


Angel of the Bones

by Marcus_S_Lazarus



Series: The Vampire in the Special Agent [1]
Category: Angel: the Series, Bones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Seeley Booth is Angel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 84
Words: 266,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26221987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marcus_S_Lazarus/pseuds/Marcus_S_Lazarus
Summary: A look at the events of "Bones" through the eyes of Special Agent Seeley Booth... the man once known as Angel, the vampire with a soul
Relationships: Seeley Booth/Temperance Brennan
Series: The Vampire in the Special Agent [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1904407
Kudos: 14





	1. After the Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own neither Angel or anything associated with him, and “Bones” is equally out of my reach control-wise
> 
> Feedback: Appreciated
> 
> AN: Here’s my latest project; a look at various crucial scenes in the first four seasons of “Bones” based on the premise that Angel and Booth are the same person. The first chapter looks at HOW Angel went from himself to Booth, based on the premise that everything up to the conclusion of “After the Fall”, with Los Angeles being returned to Earth from Hell, still took place- it involves a bit of time travel, but it was the only way I could think of to account for what we know of Booth’s army and federal career-, and all subsequent chapters will feature brief scenes from the various episodes of “Bones” told from Angel/Booth’s perspective, and analysing how his life as Angel affects his views on those situations

As Angel stood outside the Jeffersonian building, he couldn’t help but glance at his watch; he’d never liked waiting for anything, and things had only become worse after he’d become human again.

It wasn’t that he disliked being human, of course- the obvious benefits such as being able to walk in sunlight and _not_ worry about the status of his soul generally helped him relax a great deal-, but ever since he’d regained the ability to age he hated being kept waiting around for any reason; with a normal life stretching ahead of him, he wanted to really _live_ it.

It might seem a bit strange on the surface, particularly given that he already had over two and a half centuries of life experience in his head even _without_ the extra memories the Powers had given him of his life as Seeley Booth, but he preferred to form as many real memories as possible with people who _genuinely_ knew him rather than people he’d ‘met’ in his ‘fake’ memories; it was one reason that he hadn’t really spent much time talking to ‘his’ brother Jared ever since he’d started this life, given that most of his memories of the guy technically weren’t ‘real’ and he always ended up feeling a bit like an intruder into someone else’s life whenever they spoke.

Generally, keeping his two histories straight wasn’t a problem; it had been so long since his _own_ childhood that he had no chance of confusing his present family life with his original one, even without the differing parental styles of his two ‘fathers’ (His original one was more prone to verbal assault than the physical style of Booth Senior). The second childhood memories weren’t exactly happy, of course- remembering how it felt to be seriously thinking about _killing_ yourself when you were a teenager wasn’t encouraging by any stretch of the imagination, after all-, but at least it gave him a decent excuse not to talk too much about his background; he didn’t like lying to people unless he had to, but with a childhood like he remembered most people tended to expect him to be evasive about it.

In the end, the only real problem he’d had with the whole thing was the part where he’d been sent back in time a few years before beginning his ‘new’ life. After the whole mess with Los Angeles being sent to Hell, the Powers- in the form of Cordelia, naturally; even after ascending onto a higher plane she was still doing what she could to help him- had concluded that the whole thing had attracted too much attention to the supernatural for comfort, and so they’d sent him back a few years to increase his chances of staying anonymous. Getting suddenly dumped into a pre-prepared life while still remembering the old one wasn’t exactly perfect, but with the aid of a spell that prevented anyone from recognising him as Angel if they meant him harm- coupled with the fact that he’d tended to take care to avoid any areas where he might run into people who knew him since he’d been sent back in time in the first place-, he’d managed to make it this far without any run-ins with anybody who knew him, and even managed to make a pretty good life for himself in the process.

He’d been in the Bureau for the last eight or so years since leaving the army, which he’d been a member of for around two years before that; adapting his vampire/demon fighting skills to confronting human enemies hadn’t been that difficult, and he’d retained some pretty good reflexes even without his vampire abilities that made it fairly straightforward for him to get the hang of using a gun, but…

He sighed slightly at the memory of his time as a sniper.

In the end, his time in the army had become too much like his time as Angelus; by the time he’d taken out his fiftieth target, he wasn’t even entirely sure he felt _anything_ for them any more.

He knew that the people he killed always deserved it, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier; he’d killed humans who’d deserved it back when he’d first regained his soul, and it _still_ made him feel like crap when he thought of those times.

Add in Parker to the equation (A _really_ unexpected ‘complication’, but in the end he couldn’t be that sorry about his uncertain custody status; he’d found Rebecca great company when they were dating, but he was never certain how she’d react to the knowledge of what he had been, and he still enjoyed his time with Parker when he could get it), and he’d just had more reasons to get out of the business.

He might not have custody of the kid- and _God_ , why was it he could _never_ seem to do the right thing by his kids; Connor got abducted and raised in a hell dimension for eighteen years and he barely saw Parker for more than a week a month-, but if he was going to be any kind of father, he was going to at least be someone who didn’t _kill_ people for a living.

His time in Angel Investigations might have consisted mainly of having Wesley attend to the intellectual side of things- although Doyle, Cordelia and Lorne had also been good at gathering information in their own ways-, but he’d still picked up some useful detective-based skills over the years beyond simply beating up the other guy to get the information he wanted, and his already-thorough knowledge of how most serial killers and stalkers operated from his time as Angelus was even more effective at helping him get into the minds of his targets.

Of course, it didn’t mean he was capable of dealing with the larger cases he might encounter on his

“Special Agent Booth?” a voice said, drawing Angel’s attention back to the present, prompting him to register the presence of the speaker; a woman about his physical age, shoulder-length brown hair framing a smooth round face with clear blue eyes, dressed in a casual yet smart pair of dark trousers and a dark shirt, standing at the door with an impatient glare. “Doctor Temperance Brennan; I understand the F.B.I. requested my presence?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Angel replied, nodding back at her in confirmation as he shook her hand, all thoughts of his vampiric past pushed aside in favour of the more immediate matter.

Reflections on the past could wait; right now, he needed this woman’s help to find a murder victim, and he was going to get down to business as soon as possible.


	2. Pilot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1: The first chapter, looking at crucial events in the pilot episode through the eyes of Booth when he was once known as Angel; hope you all like it
> 
> 2: To clarify in advance, all scenes in the episodes happen the same way they did originally; I’m just focusing on those moments where Angel’s past would have a particular influence on his thoughts about certain issues
> 
> 3: Just to get this out of the way, when Booth’s talking with someone, he’ll think of himself as Booth, but he’ll be Angel when he’s in private; he might think of himself as more ‘Booth’ than ‘Angel’ now, but that doesn’t mean over two centuries of life are going to be discarded to his subconscious just because he’s alive now

As he stood outside Director Sam Cullen’s office waiting for his superior to finish with his current meeting- he wasn’t sure if he’d ever get entirely used to that; after so long being in charge when he was in a group, working for others might take the pressure of him to always be the one to save the day but it still could get somewhat uncomfortable at times-, Angel couldn’t help but wonder why he was doing this.

Doctor Temperance Brennan- or ‘Bones’ as he liked to call her; ‘Temperance’ was too much of a mouthful to say all the time, calling her ‘Tempe’ would have run the risk of giving the impression that she was only a temp rather than a professional and thus leaving them less inclined to answer her interrogation attempts, and she rubbed her doctorate in his face enough without him deliberately drawing attention to it by calling her ‘Doctor Brennan’, so ‘Bones’ had seemed like a good choice for a nickname- might be brilliant, but at the same time she was primarily a scientist; even when she was off doing field work in foreign countries she wasn’t exactly entering into a position where she’d be going one-on-one with someone capable of cold-bloodedly murdering a human being and leaving them in the state that this latest body had been found in…

No, he had to face facts; in the end, the main reason he’d wanted her to stay out of this investigation was that he found the connotations of the whole situation a bit… uncomfortable.

Quite frankly, she _already_ reminded him too much of three of the most important women in his old life; her background and skills might be different, but her martial arts abilities automatically reminded him of Buffy, her lack of tact- albeit out of a lack of experience in social situations rather than the result of a thoughtless personality- evoked memories of Cordelia, and he was certain that her intellect would have made Fred look like an idiot if they’d gone into the same fields rather than Fred studying physics while Bones went into anthropology…

Add in helping him track down criminals in a more active role than just studying the bodies, and he wasn’t sure if he could maintain his needed distance…

Angel shook that thought aside; it wasn’t like _that_ was going to happen anyway. His current relationship with Tessa was pleasant enough (He still sometimes felt strange pursuing an actual relationship after so long as a vampire- even his time with Nina had mainly consisted of a few shared meals and just the occasional night together, and that was the most normal relationship he’d had as a vampire- but she was definitely engaging company), and if he’d learned anything from his attempts at relationships with Buffy and Cordelia, it was that mixing business with pleasure by trying to have a relationship with a colleague was just too… complicated.

He could definitely see Bones being a friend, but he’d made the mistake of getting too close twice before and it had only resulted in both parties getting burned; he wouldn’t do that to someone else he fought alongside again.

Working actively with Bones on cases could definitely work if that was what it took to get her expertise, but anything closer than a professional relationship would be a _really_ bad idea…

As Cullen’s door finally opened and the previous agent walked out, Angel shook those thoughts aside- worrying about possible attachments he might or might not develop to a woman who could _never_ be more than a friend to him wasn’t relevant; solving this murder was what mattered now-, assumed what Gunn would probably have referred to as his ‘Booth mode’, and walked into the office, already aware that Cullen wasn’t going to be entirely happy with this latest turn of events.

“You guaranteed a squint a field roll in an active murder investigation?” Cullen said, picking up the conversation that they’d begun on the phone as though it had never been interrupted.

“Yes sir,” Booth replied.

“The one that wrote the book?” Cullen asked; evidently he was trying to process this latest turn of events by asking the same question in different ways.

“Yes sir.”

“I thought you said she wouldn’t work with you anymore?” Cullen asked, his pointed expression clearly seeking clarification for the reasons behind that attitude.

“Well,” Booth replied, shrugging slightly, “the last case we worked she provided a description of the murder weapon and the murderer, but I didn’t give her much credence.”

“Why not?”

“Because she did it by looking at the victim’s autopsy x-rays,” Booth replied, hoping that the explanation would suffice; he hadn’t felt that Bones’s explanation had been sufficient at the time, but any explanation involving that kind of advanced technology still made him somewhat uncomfortable, mainly because he’d spent so long operating on relatively low-tech methods of determining cause of death such as claw or teeth marks on the body…

“Well,” Cullen said, his slight sniff of amusement putting Booth’s mind to rest in that regard, “I wouldn’t have given it much credence either.”

“Turns out she was right on both,” Booth added, deciding to get to the central issue as he stood up and handed the latest file over to Cullen. “Plus, the pond victim? Doctor Brennan was able to give me the victims’ age, sex, and favourite sport.”

“Which is?” Cullen asked, unable to stop a brief, amused laugh at the sight of the skeleton before him; clearly, like Booth, he found the idea of someone finding anything from that skeleton surprising.

“Tennis,” Booth said, knowing that the word was all he needed.

“She’s good,” Cullen said with a brief nod.

“No; she’s amazing,” Booth corrected. “If the only way I can get her back on my side is to bring her out in the field, I’m willing.”

“Fine,” Cullen nodded in response after a brief pause. “She’s on you. Take a squint out in the field, she’s your responsibility.”

“Yes sir,” Booth confirmed as he took back the folders, already quietly confident about his chances; if he could keep the majority of a group of barely-trained high school students- as well as a virtually incompetent Watcher- alive in a fight with a mass of vampires during the Ascension, he could definitely keep one squint alive when facing a _human_ murderer…

\-----------

As he walked down the stairs towards the shooting range, Booth wasn’t surprised to see Bones standing at one end of the range firing bullets at the target with a cool ease that matched most of the mental imagery he’d already formed of her personality. As though hearing his presence despite her ear protectors, she removed the protectors and turned to look at him briefly, her expression neutral as she took him in.

“Thought I’d find you here,” Booth said by way of explanation, even as she turned her head back to look at the target.

“Y’know,” he said, as he shrugged and walked towards her, “you being a good shot and doing martial arts; it’s all your way of dealing. I mean, who knows better than you how fragile life can be?”

“Maybe an Army Ranger Sniper who became an FBI homicide investigator?” Bones replied, her tone casual and giving no indication of her feelings on his past.

“Ah,” Booth said, trying not to show his thoughts on the matter; he might not have the same kind of body count as a human that he had accumulated as Angelus, but he still didn’t like it when people learned about the lives he’d taken. “You looked me up, huh?”

Trying to pass that topic off, he walked over to stand beside her, indicating the gun now lying in front of the anthropologist. “Do you mind?”

“Be my guest,” Bones replied, sliding the gun over to him.

“Thanks,” Booth said briefly, picking up the gun and aiming it at the target before firing one shot, only feeling partly disappointed when the shot only just hit the target; he wasn’t used to this style of gun, but he’d thought that his shooting abilities were better than that.

“Were you any good at being a sniper?” Bones asked, amusement clear in her voice.

“A sniper gets to know a little something about killers,” Booth said, deciding to ignore that comment in favour of focusing on the central issue that should be occupying their attention at the moment, while trying not to think about the fact that his time as Angelus meant that he had a better insight into killers than what he was implying he possessed. “Senator Bethlehem? He’s no killer.”

“Oh, and Oliver Lauriea is?” Bones asked, turning around to face him as she leaned against the small wall behind her, prompting Angel to turn and face her himself.

“The way I read Lauriea, he’s unhinged,” he said, lowering his voice as he spoke. “That makes him dangerous.”

“That would be your gut telling you that, correct?” Bones replied.

“You know, homicides?” Angel continued, once again ignoring Bones’s comment, placing a hand on the wall behind her as he continued speaking. “They’re not solved by scientists; they’re solved by guys like me asking a thousand questions a thousand times, catching people telling lies every time. You’re great at what you do Bones but you don’t solve murders; cops do.”

(He freely acknowledged that there were some cases where cops _couldn’t_ solve murders- particularly when elements from his ‘old’ life came into play- but he wasn’t going to focus on those; the world had Buffy and her Slayer army to tackle the supernatural elements in existence now, and all he had to worry about was more conventional killers.)

“Cleo Eller,” Bones retorted, moving slightly forward to bring their faces even closer together, “was killed on a cement floor sprinkled with diatomaceous earth. Traces of her blood will still be in that cement. One of us is wrong. Maybe both of us. But if Bethlehem wasn’t a Senator you would be right there in his basement looking for that killing floor. You’re afraid of him. Your hypothesis is that squints don’t solver murders and cops do?”

With that statement, she shot a brief, cocky smile in his direction. “Prove it. Be a cop.”

With that, Bones turned around and walked away, leaving him staring silently after her, her words turning around in his head.

He had to admit, the whole thing with the current prime suspect being a senator didn’t exactly make him feel comfortable; unlike those occasions when he’d had to deal with vampires like Russell Winters in the past, he couldn’t just kick this guy out of the window and walk away without even a body to show for it, even if he’d been _certain_ that the guy was guilty…

Without even being certain why he did it- maybe he just wanted to remind himself that he _was_ in control of _something_ at this point- Booth drew his gun from its holster and fired it twice at the target that Bones had been shooting at earlier, pausing just long enough to confirm that his accuracy with this weapon was undiminished- two shots straight to the head, pretty much where the left eye would be; not a bad shot, really- before he turned around and headed back up the stairs.

Right now, he had some things he needed to think about before things went any further…

\-----------

As he watched Bones walk away from the casket, the rest of the ‘Squint Squad’- not that he’d ever call them all that to their faces- simply standing around him, Booth shrugged off any thoughts about what he should or shouldn’t do at this point and walked off to join Bones, swiftly settling into a brief, companionable silence alongside her before he finally sighed.

“What?” Bones asked, looking briefly back at him.

“Told you it wasn’t the senator,” Booth said, deciding that he might as well start by pointing out where she’d gone wrong.

“And I told you who it was, so we’re even,” Bones finished, her tone only slightly smug.

“‘Cept,” Booth added, “we work on the same cases, and _you_ end up on the _New York Times_ best-sellers list.”

“I didn’t know that,” Bones said, looking back at him in evident surprise.

“Mmm-hmm,” Booth nodded- he was briefly reminded of Fred’s surprise when she saw that her speech was one of the main highlights at that Physics thing she’d been invited to, before that whole mess with her discovery about Professor Siedel’s role in her time in Pylea-, smiling slightly at her. “Number three with a bullet.”

“That’s good, right?” Bones asked. “The New York Times with a bullet?”

“It means you’re rich,” Booth replied briefly. “Call your accountant.”

“I don’t have an accountant,” Bones replied with a brief laugh.

“Well, get one,” Booth replied dismissively.

“OK… how does that work?” Bones asked, looking inquiringly at him, prompting a brief sigh from Booth.

“You _need_ to get out of the lab,” he said (He wouldn’t think about the fact that he only picked up anything about having an accountant from his time in charge of Wolfram & Hart). “Y’know, watch TV, turn on the radio, anything. Pick up the phone and…”

His voice trailed off as he realised that she was looking at something behind her, prompting him to glance back and watch as he saw the Ellers walking over to place roses on Cleo’s grave.

Despite the solemn nature of the whole proceeding, Booth couldn’t help but feel a certain satisfaction at the resolution.

“You know,” he said, turning back to look at Bones, “if it weren’t for you those people would never have known what happened to their daughter. That’s gotta be worse then the truth.”

“I know exactly how the Ellers felt about Cleo,” Bones replied, still staring out at the funeral as though she wasn’t even sure she should be saying this. “My parents disappeared when I was fifteen and nobody knows what happened to them.”

For a moment, Booth wasn’t sure what to say- he’d already known what she told him, but the fact that she’d chosen to share it on her own meant a great deal-, but then the right words came to him.

“Me being a sniper,” he said at last, focusing on the more ‘human’ explanation for his motivations- the fact that he was human might have meant he’d achieved redemption for his sins as a vampire, but his human murders and his poor behaviour when he was Liam still needed to be accounted for-, “I… I took a lot of lives. What I’d like to do before I’m done… is try to catch at least that many murderers.”

Despite the solemn nature of the statement, Bones smiled at him.

“Please don’t tell me you think there’s some kind of… cosmic balance sheet?” she said, a faint amusement in the idea in her voice that only an atheist could possess.

Booth didn’t bother answering, but simply stared back at her, until the smile faded in place of a resolute nod.

“I’d like to help you with that,” she said.

It wasn’t much, but Booth couldn’t help but remember an Irish-accented voice asking him a question with a similar meaning to Brennan’s last statement, so many years ago.

“ _You know there’s a lot of people in this city that need helping_.”

“ _So I’ve noticed_.”

“ _You gam_ _e_?”

“ _I’m game_.”

Bones was so far from being his new Doyle it was almost ridiculously funny to even _think_ of comparing the two, but the fundamental basics of the situation were the same; he’d been looking for a way to help people, and Doyle and Bones both offered him a way to do that more effectively than what he’d been doing previously (Buffy had primarily inspired him to actually try making a long-term effort; she hadn’t actually given him any ideas on _how_ to do that beyond the obvious details of staking vampires before they could kill anyone).

As the two of them walked off towards the entrance to the cemetery, Booth couldn’t shake the feeling that he was setting off on a path that would lead to some _very_ interesting cases in his new life…


	3. The Man in the SUV

As Bones stormed out of the lab towards her office, Booth wished that he was able to summon the energy to be as defensive about Agent Gibson’s presence as he would have liked. In all honesty, he couldn’t help but agree with her evidently negative opinion of having someone looking over her shoulder while she worked; after comparing Giles’s abilities as a Watcher with Wesley’s tenure in the role- before he’d relocated to Los Angeles, of course-, he’d recognised fairly quickly that Buffy’s main reason for being so successful with Giles in charge was that Giles had generally allowed her free reign during her patrols even when he’d been monitoring her performance, while Wesley tended to keep trying to tell Buffy how to do things.

Of course, the situation wasn’t quite the same here- Gibson wasn’t exactly telling her how to do her job, he just wanted to be there while she was doing it- but the essential essence of the problem remained the same.

“This is my lab,” Bones said as she walked down the hallway towards her office in frustration, Booth just behind her. “I’m a scientist, a doctor-”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” Booth pointed out, allowing himself a brief smile at her now-familiar reference to her doctrate.

“Look, would _you_ be able to do your job if someone was looking over your shoulder all the time?” Bones countered, turning around to face him with her hands raised in frustration even as she continued to walk backwards.

“You do; I’ve developed a tolerance,” Booth retorted, his mind briefly flashing back to Wesley in his early days in the agency; the man had been great at research in the early days, but his poor combat skills had caused more than one problem at that time.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Bones said, as she turned back around and continued walking, “but I don’t understand the ‘advantage’ of compromise-”

“This is a terrorist attack, Bones,” Booth interjected, not wanting to get drawn into a debate about compromise after he’d spent almost a year doing that during his time in charge of Wolfram & Hart; even if he was confident he could maintain enough control not to mention that time of his life, he preferred to avoid thinking about it unless he had to. “It’s bigger than you, and it’s bigger than me.”

“The job is the same-” Bones began, pausing in her office doorway as she turned to face him.

“No, it’s _not_ ,” Booth countered, walking forward slightly so that he was standing closer to her to better emphasise his words. “We’re dealing with someone here who devalues an entire culture; terrorizing people by using God to justify mass murder.”

Even as he spoke, his memories briefly flashed back to Darla’s old enjoyment of religious wars; this kind of thing had always given her a sick sense of pleasure that he’d never fully understood even as Angelus (Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t shared her pleasure back then; he just hadn’t quite understood what she’d been _that_ excited about).

“You’re making it personal,” Bones said, looking silently at him; for a moment, Booth wondered at the fact that someone so apparently bad at understanding people could be that good at understanding _him_ …

“It is personal, Bones”, he said simply. “All of us die a little bit on one like this.”

_Particularly when it reminds you of all the times you did the same thing yourself_ … he reflected grimly as he turned away to give her time to cool down on her own, once again facing the familiar feeling of being torn between his wish to forget the past horrors he’d committed and his refusal to forget the faces of those he’d killed.

\-----------

As he stepped off an elevator inside the main FBI building, practically _feeling_ Bones’s smile without even needing to see it, Booth finally lost patience.

“OK, _what_ is so funny?” he asked, looking at her in frustration.

“I just never figured you being in a relationship,” Bones replied, a broad grin on her face.

“Why?” Booth asked, his mind briefly flashing back to Trevor Bryce’s comment about him being a eunuch when he and the others interrupted his attempt to sacrifice Virginia. “Do you think something’s _wrong_ with me?”

“Not _wrong_ ,” Bones clarified as they entered a nearby office area with only a couple of lower-level agents inside; it was at least more private than the corridor. “You just have alpha male attributes usually associated with a solitary existence.”

“What, _me_?” Booth said in surprise; he knew that he still wasn’t exactly a very social person, but compared to his life as Angel when you could count his close friends on two hands- back in Sunnydale Willow had been the closest thing he’d had to an actual friend in the gang outside of Buffy-, he liked to think that he’d improved since then. “ _You’re_ solitary.”

“No no,” Bones retorted, her tone actually sounding slightly condescending, “I’m private; it’s different, and we weren’t talking about me-”

“Well, I was-” Booth countered.

“Well, I _wasn’t_ ,” Bones replied, before she spread her arms in a shrugging gesture. “Look, I’m happy for you. Relationships have anthropological meaning. No society can survive if sexual bonds aren’t formed bet-”

“What the _hell_ are you talking about?” Booth asked, looking at her in frustration; he hadn’t been this exasperated with anyone since he’d last had to deal with one of Illyria’s old pre-depowerment rants about how she’d been around when humanity had yet to crawl out of the primordial slime that created them…

“Booth?” another voice said from the side, prompting the two of them to turn around just in time to see Agent Santana appear from around the corner.

“Yeah?” Booth replied, glad to have sometime to take his attention off the current topic.

“You got that ID?” the other agent asked.

“Yeah; it was Masruk,” Booth replied.

“Oh…” Santana said, his expression grim at that statement. “That’s too bad.”

“He killed four people and injured another fifteen,” Bones said, the confusion on her face reflecting Booth’s own feelings; why was this guy showing sympathy for a man capable of that kind of destruction?

“The report came back from ballistics,” Santana said, passing the file to Booth as he spoke, giving Booth time to study it as he listened to the other man. “The explosives were placed under the care with the trigger connected to the odometer; Masruk was murdered.”

“So Masruk _wasn’t_ a terrorist…” Bones said, her head nodding slightly as she studied the information before her.

“Somebody tried to make him look like one,” Booth muttered.

Some ideas were constant wherever you went, it seemed; if it wasn’t Darla setting things up to make it look like _he_ was the one who’d attacked Joyce back when Buffy first learned what he was, than people were framing innocent men for terrible crimes…

“Any leads on who did it?” he asked, his mind back on track as he glanced up at Santana.

“That’s why we’re paying _you_ , Booth,” Santana replied, before he turned around and walked out of the office, leaving the two of them staring at the file before them.

_Damnit…_ Booth thought grimly.

He might be used to taking the lead, but there were times when he really _hated_ it when people expected him to come up with all the answers…

\-----------

As he and Bones entered the Hamilton Cultural Centre where the conference was being held, Booth wasn’t sure what made him more sick; the fact that someone was planning to kill this many people for some petty religious reason that he couldn’t fully understand, or the fact that he’d killed his own _brother_ as part of his agenda.

God… he still had the occasional nightmare about Angelus’s murder of Kathy back when he’d begun his reign of terror as Angelus; the thought that Farid had done that as _himself_ just to protect his own sick agenda…

He shook off his moral disgust at the guy’s actions for later; right now, he had to find the guy before he could set off a bomb, capable of killing or contaminating anyone in the blast radius, in an open area filled with people and no way of knowing where he was going to set it off.

“We’ll start down here and make our way upstairs,” he said, nodding briefly at Bones as they walked through the last glass door before splitting up to take in the people around them; he wished that he’d been able to keep her out of this- this kind of fanaticism wasn’t something she should have to deal with on only her second active case with him, and the response team Homeland Security had on its way should be able to cover the rest of the building-, but with time the way it was, he’d just have to deal with the situation at hand and hope for the best.

“There are too many ways in,” Bones said, her voice drawing his attention where the conference announcer couldn’t as she reached the foot of the escalator and began to ascend towards the upper floor, Booth quickly falling into position behind her.

“Where are the reinforcements?” Bones practically hissed at him, her voice low as she glanced anxiously around them. “Aren’t there always reinforcements?”

“Sure, they’re downstairs tying up the horses,” Booth retorted.

“Sarcasm doesn’t help,” Bones said, her own voice low as she turned to look at him before returning her gaze to stare at the upper floor.

“OK,” Booth admitted, “they’re mobilising SWAT teams and additional agents, but it takes _time_ , and if Farid has the bomb and spots them, it could be bad.”

“If you see him, will you shoot?” Bones asked as they walked to the balcony at the edge of the floor and began to walk along it, scanning the people below them for any sign of Farid.

“Well, he might not have the bomb,” Booth responded, trying not to consider the consequences if that statement proved to be incorrect; the last thing he wanted was to be responsible for another death unless he was _certain_ it was the only way to prevent anyone else dying…

“You don’t believe that?” Bones said, voicing his own concerns on the matter.

“I’m not taking out a target, Bones, unless I’m sure,” he responded, his gaze still fixed on the crowd below him.

“Is that how you make it easier?” Bones asked, her tone giving no indication of her feelings about the topic. “Calling him a target?”

“You know,” Booth said after a brief pause as he continued walking, “you really picked an odd time to have this conversation.”

For a woman who always claimed she didn’t believe in psychology, Bones was surprisingly good at it when she wanted to be…

Forcing those thoughts aside as they continued to walk around the floor- including a brief encounter with someone who slightly resembled Farid in profile before a glance at his face confirmed that he wasn’t the man they were looking for-, before Booth suddenly ran over to a corner of the balcony.

“There!” she yelled, pointing at something on the level below them. “That’s Farid!”

Hurrying over to join her, his gun in his hand- it still felt so small compared to the sniper rifle he’d wielded at first and the sword he’d used in so many battles in his time as a vampire-, Booth glanced down in the direction that her finger was pointing, only to see a figure in a dark jacket and grey trousers with dark hair walking towards the main crowd at the conference, with a bag at his side that could have held camera equipment or a bomb.

“I’m not sure…” Booth said awkwardly; he might trust that Bones knew what she was talking about in the lab, but Wesley in the early days had proven all too effectively that there was a significant difference between what you could do at a desk and how you performed in reality…

“Look!” Bones said urgently, indicating the man’s slightly dragging legs. “His walk is labored from the dioxin poisoning and the parietal bones in his skull match his picture-!”

“His back’s to us,” Booth replied briefly; she could recount the scientific reasons why it might be him all she wanted, but he wasn’t going to fire his gun without evidence. “What if you’re wrong?”

“This is what I _do_ , Booth; do you really want to wait?” Bones asked, turning to look impatiently at him before she turned back to point at Farid, her voice now speaking at a more rapid pace. “He’s carrying something heavy in his camera bag; see how the extra weight is causing his shoulder to-”

“No, I can’t!” Booth cut her off, refusing to listen to any more of her science; the last time he’d relied on instinct without gathering all the facts, he’d ended up killing a demon who’d actually been trying to _help_ the woman who’d been there at the time…

He’d acted rashly in dealing with the Prio Motu demon, and Jo and her baby had almost died; he _wasn’t_ going to make that mistake again…

“He has all the markers, Booth!” Bones protested.

For a moment, Booth hesitated, and then he raised his gun, taking aim for a moment in case she was correct…

“I need a face,” he said at last, once he was certain the man was in his sight. “I need a _face_ -!”

“FARID!” Bones yelled out, prompting the figure to turn and face them, providing the clear confirmation of identity that Booth had been looking for.

“On the ground!” Booth yelled, his gun now fixed on Farid’s face as the man’s hand reached for the bag…

Booth didn’t even need to hear Bones’s comment about the bomb to know what he had to do; almost without thinking, he sent a bullet directly into the centre of Farid’s forehead, sending the Arab falling to the ground as people screamed and retreated from the fallen body…

He might not be doing it with his bare hands any more, but one thing hadn’t changed; when he started killing people, everyone else around him started to run.

It was only when he saw Agent Gibson’s brief confirming nod at the presence of the bomb in Farid’s bag that Booth allowed himself to relax; the number of _innocent_ people he’d killed hadn’t increased.

If only the same thing could be said about the number of people he’d killed overall…

He might not be killing humans for his own pleasure any more, but every time he took another person’s life with his soul intact, Booth couldn’t help but wonder how much longer it would be before the line between him and Angelus stopped keeping his own worse nature where it should remain…


	4. The Boy in the Tree

“How hard can it be to find out which one of your students is missing?” Booth asked, looking in frustration at the Hanover Prep headmaster as he walked downstairs from the upper levels after a brief search for evidence of a break-in, the head of security just behind them.

He’d barely known either man more than a couple of hours, but their lack of reaction towards a dead boy hanging in a tree (Showing more concern about the implications for _them_ rather than for the boy’s family) meant that he already didn’t like either of them; if Connor had still been his responsibility, he _definitely_ wouldn’t have sent his son to this place even if he could have afforded it, and Parker was _unquestionably_ never even going to _hear_ about this case...

Admittedly, the principal wasn’t as bad as some of the stories Buffy had told him about that ‘Snyder’ guy who’d been principal during Buffy’s years at Sunnydale High- at least he actually seemed to show _some_ concern for the students, rather than Snyder’s traditional attitude of treating anything remotely relating to teenagers with virtual loathing-, but his concern with the school’s reputation over the life of a student was _not_ doing him any favours in Booth’s eyes…

“We can’t just call parents and say ‘We found a rotting body; do you know where your child is?’,” Sanders said, his tone suggesting that he couldn’t believe what Booth was asking them to do.

“We can do a full role call tomorrow,” the headmaster added, evidently sharing Sanders’s view on the situation.

“All of our higher-risk students are accounted for-” Sanders added.

“Higher risk?” Booth interjected, his mind automatically going over what that could mean and not liking the immediate implications; the idea that they had students on _suicide watch_...

“The ones with personal bodyguards,” Sanders clarified as they entered the headmaster’s office, simultaneously assuaging and elevating Booth’s concerns; why was it that places like this seemed to focus more on themselves than the children they were meant to be responsible for?

“What are our options vis-a-ve publicity, media-?” the headmaster began.

“Not my concern,” Booth replied briefly; he hadn’t bothered about that kind of thing as Angel- beyond wanting to avoid it too much himself in case someone realised what he was- and he wasn’t about to start now.

“There are students here we... really don’t want the whole world to know about,” Sanders said, automatically lowering Booth’s opinion of him even further; what were the chances that one investigation would reveal _all_ the students that this school had to the general public.

“It’s obviously a suicide,” the headmaster added, with that same tone of casual certainty that he’d heard far too often from Wolfram & Hart operatives in the past. “It’s not as though we’re asking you to forgo the glory of catching a murderer.”

Booth was just grateful that his phone rang at that point; he might have been tempted to punch somebody if he hadn’t had a good excuse to focus on something else.

“Excuse me, I’m sorry,” he said, pulling out the phone and accepting the call as he raised it to his ear, ignoring the glances the other two men exchanged. “Booth.”

“ _We’ll have the identity of the boy in the tree within the hour_ ,” Bones’s voice said on the other end of the line.

“That was fast,” he commented, taking care to keep his tone neutral; letting his emotions out in a situation like this wouldn’t help anything.

“ _Do you know what a cochlear implant is_?” Bones asked.

“Hearing aid?” Booth responded; he’d tried to brush up on modern events after so long staying relatively out of touch during his time as Angel, but some things were just easier to remember than others...

“ _Not exactly_ ,” Bones replied. “ _It’s a much more sophisticated piece of equipment which is surgically fitted_ -”

“Can you identify him through the serial number?” Booth asked, a reason for her mentioning this detail occurring to him (And _God_ , he was grateful he’d listened to Fred’s talk about serial numbers during one of their rare quiet days at Wolfram & Hart).

“ _That’s correct_ ,” Bones confirmed, “ _but the interesting thing is that_ -”

“You can fill me in later,” Booth interjected; right now, he had to deal with the headmaster and Sanders, and he’d prefer to limit the time he had to spend with them before he did something he’d regret.

“ _No, but the interesting thing is that it’s_ -” Bones began.

“That is correct,” Booth interjected, trying to give the impression that he was approaching the end of the conversation.

“... _What_?” Bones asked after a moment’s pause.

“That is... interesting,” he said, wishing that she’d take the hint he was giving her and hang up.

“ _Are you drunk or something_?” his partner asked him in confusion.

“Ah, we’ll catch up later,” Booth said, impatient to end this conversation without appearing too impolite. “And, uh, thanks for calling.”

“ _Wait_ ,” Bones began again. “ _I’m not completely certain the boy’s death was a suicide_ -”

“Ah, you know,” Booth concluded, finally hitting on the perfect way to close this argument and get back to the questions he _really_ wanted to answer- particularly after hearing that titbit; at least now he knew there was a good chance that he had something to go after-, “we’ll grab some Chinese food and you can fill me in later on all the boring details.”

With that he terminated the phone call, shrugging apologetically at the two men before him, muttering a brief apology that even he didn’t believe.

“A death is very... upsetting to a community as tight as ours,” Sanders said, clearly aware that Booth wasn’t buying his story and trying to press the importance of the false one onto him.

“Famous for keeping your students safe, but you can’t be held responsible if a troubled student kills himself,” Booth concluded, strongly missing the old days as Angel when he could punch anybody who got on his nerves to this extent; he might have more official authority as Booth, but he’d gained eminently more immediate satisfaction in the days when he could beat up the bad guys without worrying about claims of ‘police brutality’ in the aftermath.

“We all agree that suicide is the only feasible conclusion,” Sanders said, in a tone that suggested there’d been a long conversation leading up to this point that Booth had missed.

“We understand each other?” the headmaster asked.

“We sure as hell do,” Booth replied, knowing even as he said it that his discomfort at that statement was obvious.

“I’ll need a complete enrolment list,” he said, clearing his throat to draw attention away from his earlier tone. “Including teachers, staff, students-”

“That’s extremely confidential information,” Sanders said, his tone making it clear that he wasn’t certain Booth could be trusted with that information.

“You know,” Booth countered, already smiling at the aptness of what he was about to say, “luckily, I’m good at keeping secrets.”

Even as Sanders turned to collect the files, Booth wondered how the man would react if he was aware of the _scale_ of secrets he was keeping from the world; keeping the truth from those who could never accept it was one thing, but there were definitely times he wouldn’t mind shaking up the world-view of some of the more pompous assholes he encountered in this line of work...

* * *

  
As he drove along the streets leading to the ambassador’s house, Booth allowed himself a brief, satisfied smile at the knowledge of how recent events had played out.

He might not be _officially_ investigating a murder yet- there were probably all kinds of pen-pushers in Washington who’d be willing to do anything to get it categorized as a suicide for the sake of the school-, but at least Bones’s conclusion that they were tackling a murder meant that he had more time to create an accurate picture of the situation...

“Thank you,” he said at last, when he realised for certain that Bones wasn’t going to say anything; he was still more used to being the person who _participated_ in conversations rather than being the one who initiated them...

“For what?” Bones asked, looking briefly back at him.

“For going with my instincts in there,” he clarified,

“I did not back up your instincts; I bought time to find the facts I need to tell me what happened to Nester Olivos,” Bones clarified.

Booth didn’t bother arguing with her about that; she might have a different reason for doing this than him, but the central objective they were both aiming for remained the same, and that was what mattered.

“What’s with you and the private school?” Bones asked, breaking the momentary silence once again.

“I thought we understood each other,” Booth replied.

“Oh, that’s bad?” Bones asked uncertainly.

“I don’t... I don’t like people who think they’re better than other people,” Booth said, even if that statement barely scratched the surface; after all the time Angelus had spent being so confident about his own superiority over everyone he met simply because he was a vampire, ideas of superiority _really_ made him uncomfortable...

“Some people _are_ better than other people-” Bones began.

“You know,” Booth interjected, determined to cut that train of thought off before it could go too far- he was fairly confident Bones wouldn’t actually take that line of thought as far as his demon had taken it back in the day, but it was an uncomfortable reminder of a past he’d rather avoid-, “what you said right there; that is _so_ un-American. All men are created equal; either you believe that, or you don’t-”

“Some people are smarter than others; there’s no use being offended by the fact,” Bones replied.

For a moment Booth thought about protesting that just because some people were smarter than others didn’t mean they were better than _everyone_ \- intellect didn’t equal an automatic superiority in everything-, but right now this wasn’t the time for something like that; they had a more immediate matter to deal with right now.

“What are we going to tell Nester’s parents?” Bones asked, drawing the conversation back to the relevant issue.

“We tell them that their son was found dead,” Booth answered bluntly. “We’re looking into it, we’re sorry for your loss... and we _are_.”

“What?” Bones asked.

“Sorry for their loss,” Booth clarified. “It’s sad; try to remember that.”

“I’m not a _sociopath_ -!” Bones protested.

“You’re bad with people, OK,” Booth said, even as he made a mental note to apologise for that implication at a more convenient moment; it might be true, but ever since Wesley had helped him get past his own concerns about Groo replacing him he hated rubbing his friend’s shortcomings in their faces unless he had to. “No use being offended by the fact.”

The rest of the journey might have subsequently become slightly uncomfortable as they proceeded in relatively silence as Brennan looked at him in frustration, but Booth nevertheless allowed himself some slight satisfaction at having won the argument; it made a nice change to be the one making the valid point in his ‘debates’ with Bones.

* * *

  
As he walked into Wong Foo’s for the belated lunch that he’d arranged earlier, Booth allowed himself a satisfied smile as the portly form of Sid walked out from behind the bar to greet him; the man might be several pounds heavier and possess a less vivid skin colour than Lorne- to say nothing of his less active role in the lives of his customers, of course-, but there was something about the guy that always helped Booth relax whenever he came here, as though he was back in the protected environment of Caritas once again...

“Hey,” Sid said, nodding at Booth as he indicated Bones. “I’ll say this; she’s tall.”

“Doctor Temperance Brennan,” Booth said, deciding not to answer that statement as he turned slightly back to look at Bones, “meet Sid, the owner.”

“Hey, the bone lady,” Sid said, shaking her hand as he led the two of them over to Booth’s usual booth (Looking back, Booth sometimes wondered where the Powers had come up with that as his new name, and was just grateful that Spike had never met him like this; he could just picture the ribbing he’d have received from his grandchilde for being named after an item of restaurant furniture).

“The sign says Wong Foo’s,” Bones said, clearly slightly confused as she and Booth took their seats.

“Family name changed at Ellis Island,” Sid said simply. “I’ll get your meal.”

“But we didn’t order-” Bones began as Sid walked off towards the kitchens.

“No, Sid knows what most people want better than they do,” Booth said by way of explanation- one of those other little examples of things in his new life where he wasn’t certain if they were supernatural in nature or just unusual quirks of nature-, only for his next statement to be cut off by the sight of the rest of the squints coming into the restaurant, Zach almost automatically throwing some files onto the table as he approached them.

“Nester’s bones are completely normal,” he said, as he moved into the booth to sit next to Bones while Angela and Hodgins slid in alongside Booth. “Not brittle in any way.”

“You know,” Booth muttered, as Angela not-so-subtly shoved him along into the middle of the booth, mourning the days when a stern glare would be enough to get him what he was looking for, “this is _kinda_ my little ‘getaway place’, you know?”

“It proves that the rope left in the branch where Nester was hanging are too deep for his weight,” Angela explained, acting as though she hadn’t heard him despite her close proximity to him.

“Please, everyone...” Booth muttered, looking upwards in frustration as the squints crowded in around them. “You know, come on; just sit down.”

“Eggs, larva, waste,” Hodgins said- like Angela, displaying an apparent lack of awareness of Booth’s presence- as Booth studied a picture of the corpse only to pass it on to Bones (He might have spent two centuries dead, but at least he’d stopped decomposing a long time ago; in some ways it was the _decay_ more than the _death_ he had trouble with), “all indicate that the insects which fed on the body are all indigenous to the tree in which he was found. It means he died there approximately ten to fourteen days ago. I’ll have the seven organ soup!” he added, turning around to call over to the bar.

“You don’t order; the guy just... brings it,” Bones said, her voice her usual half-distracted tone as she studied the photos in her hands.

“He didn’t void,” Zach said, displaying the usual lack of tact that sometimes reminded Booth of Cordelia’s early days barring the fact that Cordy was tactless out of brutal honesty while Zach just didn’t seem to know when to be quiet. “Usually somebody hangs themselves, the flood gates open; bodily fluids everywhere.”

“There was plenty of the affluent in his clothes but they are all post decomposition,” Hodgins continued as he studied the photographs. “As the body swells, it bursts from internal gases... How does the guy know what you want?”

“The guy has a knack,” Bones answered simply.

“The ‘guy’s’ name is _Sid_ ,” Booth interjected, trying to establish some degree of control over the mess what was supposed to be a quiet dinner had become; this place was meant to be the new Caritas, not somewhere to discuss the case of a dead boy.

“The birds ate his eyes and ears, working their way into the skull,” Zach continued.

“Birds pecking at the soft tissue of the throat; could that crack the hyoid?” Hodgins cut in.

“No,” Bones confirmed, shaking her head, “it’s a stress fracture caused by the rope against his throat; not post-mortem.”

“You put a high sensitive adolescent in a high pressure prep school,” Angela pointed out, her tone reflective as she spoke, “add social alienation, cultural differences, pressure from high achieving parents… could be suicide.”

“It’s _not_ suicide,” Booth said, reaching over to pick up a small bowl of nuts from the middle of the table; maybe he’d relax more if he had something to chew on...

“Because Booth thinks that prep schools turn out entitled criminals,” Bones said, indicating him with a brief wave of her hand.

“We all went to private school and none of _us_ are criminals!” Hodgins said, looking indignantly over at Booth before he could correct Bones’s statement.

“In fact,” Zach added, a slight smile on his face, “we _fight_ criminals; we’re crime fighters.”

“No, you’re not,” Booth began, glaring pointedly at Zach, preparing to begin a debate about how _finding_ criminals wasn’t the same as _fighting_ them before he cut that train of thought off; he started getting into that kind of territory and he ran the risk of giving away information about his old way of doing things that he shouldn’t be talking about.

“I’m just saying it’s _not_ a suicide,” he finished at last, determined to at least make an effort to get the last word in before he turned his attention back to the nuts.

“I’m a _big_ believer in instinct,” Angela put in.

“ _Finally_ ,” Booth said, indicating her with a brief wave of his hand. “A squint with an open mind.”

“You have _no_ idea of how open-minded I can be,” Angela said, looking at him with a slight smile that briefly put Booth in mind of Darla’s more sultry moments- barring the sadistic gleam that had always accompanied that particular smile when it came from his sire-, although further conversation was cut off when Sid and a small group of waiters arrived at the table.

“What’s with these pictures?” the restaurant owner said, looking in disgust at the photos of Nestor’s body, shoving the pictures to the side and into Zach’s lap as the staff began to lay the plates down in front of the squints. “This is a _restaurant_ ; people come here to _eat_! What’s the matter with you people? Booth, what the _hell_ did you bring into my place?”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Booth said, raising his hands defensively even as he glanced at his food with a brief, appreciative smile; the renewed ability to taste food was one aspect of the human situation he didn’t think he’d _ever_ get tired of, and Sid’s Chinese one of the best he’d ever had.

“This is _exactly_ what I want,” Bones said, studying the food before her with an appreciative smile. “This is amazing; the guy definitely has a knack.”

“Oh, so you _do_ take orders?” Hodgins added, looking at the dish before him with an appreciative smile.

“‘Course we do,” Sid said briefly. “But it’s always better when you leave it to me. _Booth_ ,” he added, indicating the photographs in frustration.

“OK, I’ll take care of it,” Booth said, turning his attention back to the conversation at hand as he nodded apologetically at the restaurant owner before he turned back to the others; maybe if he got the immediately-discussed facts of the case out of the way they could get back to a more normal dinner. “You’re saying that the boy died like ten to fourteen days ago?”

“Hey,” Hodgins replied, a lump of some kind of meat almost in his mouth as he looked over at Booth, “bugs buzz but they do not lie.”

“Hodgins is very good at using insects to ascertain a time of death,” Bones clarified as Hodgins

“How do you explain an e-mail that was sent seven days ago from Nova Scotia?” Booth asked, pulling out the e-mail print-out he’d received from the ambassador’s office and handing it to the surprised-looking Bones.

“See?” he said, nodding briefly at the piece of paper in question as he turned his attention back to his food and began to cut it, unable to keep the satisfied, confident tone out of his voice. “Look at that. It stinks. Go ahead, smell it, you know you want to smell it; it stinks.”

As he began chewing at his food, he tried to tune out the sound of Angela and Hodgins arguing about Hodgins’s seven organ soup; right now, all he wanted to do was have a good meal _without_ talking too much about disgusting corpses (Particularly after he’d spent so long as a creature where the only means of gaining sustenance was to _make_ corpses; if that didn’t make it difficult to have an appetite he didn’t know what would)...

* * *

  
As Booth walked into the restaurant, his mind already drifting from the case and onto the more immediate matters of food- some of the stuff he saw in this business just freaked him out at times; the thought that a couple of kids not much older than Connor had been the last time he saw him could kill someone they knew _without_ the excuse of a warped upbringing like what Connor had endured with Holtz in Quor-toth made him feel a bit sick-, he was almost grateful for the excuse to think about something different when he saw Zach and Angela sitting in the booth they’d used last time while Hodgins ate something at the bar.

“Oh no...” he muttered in frustration, only becoming more vocal as Bones walked over to join her team, prompting him to head over to the bar were Sid appeared to be writing out his latest decisions. “This isn’t going to work; I mean, this is my _place_! Sid?”

“As long as they keep it down on the subject of rotten corpses and bodily fluids,” Sid said, not looking up from what he was writing, “I have no beef at all.”

“OK,” Hodgins said, looking over at Booth in amazement as he stared at the food in front of him, “that is amazing. I had heartburn, I asked Sid to bring me something, and now the heartburn is gone- I mean, it’s _gone_. Man, I _love_ this place!”

“OK, fine,” Booth said, shaking his head in frustration as he walked over to stand in front of the squints’ booth. “New rules; that counter is mine; that booth is yours; everything else around here,” he continued, waving his arms at the restaurant around him, ignoring the stares he was getting from the other diners at the restaurant, “mine; alright? M-I-N-E... _mine_.”

As he sat down at the counter, he glanced over at Hodgins for a brief moment, the glare finally prompting the ‘bug guy’ to get up and leave the counter to join the other squints at the booth. Booth had just reached out to grab himself a plate of nuts and some salt for his main dish when Bones sat down beside him, a slight smile on her face as she looked at him.

“I’ve been thinking about your whole ‘something stinks’ aptitude,” she said to him, as casually as if they were merely continuing an earlier conversation.

“Yeah?” Booth asked, as he began chewing on a small handful of nuts.”

“I think you have a subconscious knack for reading body language, stress in the voice; other subtle but disconcernable indicators,” Bones explained, smiling slightly at him as she spoke, unaware of the slight tension he felt as she reminded him of all the skills he’d acquired through over a century of hunting and killing...

“It’s not mysterious,” Bones continued, waving a hand as though she wanted to cut that train of thought off before he could get it started, “but it is impressive, and in the future I will try to accord it an appropriate degree of objective worth.”

Despite the overly scientific way in which she’d paid him the compliment, Booth knew that he should be grateful; getting Bones to admit that any knowledge that hadn’t been obtained at college was impressive was a minor miracle in itself.

“Thank you, Temperance,” he said, smiling briefly at her as a plate with some kind of meat on it- he was surprisingly bad at remembering the names of some of the foods Sid gave him- in front of him. “I appreciate that.”

It was only after he’d begun chewing on his food that he realised she was still sitting there.

“So,” he said, forcing down the part of him that wanted her to remain- the whole point of his earlier speech had been to establish some _boundaries_ , not encourage them- as he waved his hands over the counter, “which part of ‘this is mine’ did you not understand? What, do you want me to say it in Latin?”

“Abset invidia,” Bones replied after a momentary pause, standing up and taking something out of her pocket before she walked back to the booth to join the other squints.

Glancing at the object she’d left behind, Booth couldn’t stop a brief smile from crossing his face as he picked it up; his own access card for the Jeffersonian examination area.

“Nice...” he reflected, feeling unbelievably touched at the gesture.

He might not be a squint on paper, but it looked like he was one of the gang where it counted...

And, faced with this proof that he’d formed a new team- even if they’d mainly come together through official orders rather than their own free will-, it wasn’t as scary as he’d thought it might be.


	5. The Man in the Bear

As he began the drive down to Aurora, Booth could only wonder how he had allowed himself to get roped into this whole mess; going off to upper Washington State was potentially a good break, but when you factored in the reason why he was going up this way in the first place he was already in a relatively poor mood (Things being eaten were a bit of a sore spot with him).

“You know,” he said after a short period of silence as the car continued down the road, “being cooped up in a crappy hotel in the middle of nowhere with a fifty dollar per diem is not my idea of a good time either, you know.”

“You only get fifty dollars a day?” Bones asked, looking at him with a glance that was the closest thing to surprise he’d seen her show. “How can you live on that?”

“OK, what do you mean?” Booth asked, shooting a brief, impatient glance over at the forensic anthropologist; one of the most awkward aspects of his life as Booth was getting used to operating on a budget after he’d spent so long as a vampire lacking any real need for money (As Angelus he tended to just kill people to get what he wanted, and when he’d acquired his soul he’d generally drawn on just enough of Angelus’s old accounts to survive during his ‘good’ decades- omitting obvious time periods such as his two-decade guilt streak after the doughnut shop incident- without ever going too far to outdo what he’d collect on insurance; acquiring an actual _budget_ as Booth had been a bit of a shock). “What do you get?”

“I don’t have a limit,” Bones replied with a somewhat dismissive shrug. “I just give them the receipts.”

“No,” Booth said, wishing he could be certain he was right about this- he’d had enough trouble learning how to manage his own finances since becoming human to learn how it worked for experts like Bones-, “you _have_ to have a limit; everyone has a limit, we work for the government-”

“I don’t have a limit,” Bones replied, in the same slightly confused tone she always used whenever she didn’t fully understand what someone was saying to her.

“But it’s not fair to the taxpayers!” Booth protested indignantly, remembering some of Cordelia’s old rants about how some of the upper-class known to her parents had once lived. “You could get one of those... thousand-dollar toilet seats!”

“I imagine I’m treated differently from you because I have an indispensible skill,” Bones replied, her nonchalantly confident tone briefly invoking memories of Wesley during the old days in Sunnydale (With the obvious exception that Bones’s arrogance was actually _merited_ at this point).

“Oh, right; indispensable,” he muttered, trying to regain control of the situation as he flicked his sunglasses back down over his eyes. “I do _not_ need you.”

“Oh, so you can determine the origin of the curf marks as well as the sex and age of the victim?” Bones asked, promptly bringing Booth back down to earth; once again, a casual comment from Bones had provided him with further reminder that he was no longer the unique combatant he’d been.

The odd thing was, he really didn’t mind it when it came from her; one of the main reasons he was coming to like the anthropologist was that she treated him basically the same way before and after she’d learned about the people he’d killed...

If anything, their relationship had actually _improved_ after she’d learned about the fact that he’d killed people; he still remembered the slight smile on her face as she’d commented that she’d like to help him with his ‘cosmic balance sheet, even when she herself didn’t believe in such a concept, as though she was grateful for him opening up to her like that...

“You know,” he said, smiling slightly at her to distract himself from his previous thoughts, “you’re a smart ass; you know that?”

“Objectively, I’d say I’m very smart, although it has nothing to do with my ass,” Bones replied, smiling briefly at him.

“You know, I tell you what; you can take me out to dinner, hmm?” Booth continued, smiling briefly at her. “Put it on your tab.”

“That doesn’t seem ethical...” Bones said, shaking her head slightly uncertainly.

“You still want that gun now, don’t ya?” he countered with a brief smile.

“We’ll start with breakfast,” Bones conceded after a brief pause.

No matter how he came by it, a free breakfast was a free breakfast; one thing he’d learned to appreciate since becoming human was the days when he could get a good meal without going nuts in his budget while at some fancy restaurant...

* * *

  
Staring at Bones as she sat in the passenger side of the sheriff’s car, having just shared her latest findings from the analysis at the Jeffersonian with the two of them, Booth wondered if his hearing had started to go already (The aging thing was one aspect of humanity that he was really ambiguous about; it was nice not to have to worry about seeing everyone around him age while he remained frozen, but the physical effort he needed to keep his body operating at anything like its original ‘standards’ could get tricky).

“A _human_ ate that guy at some point?” he said, looking incredulously at his partner; humans being eaten by things might not exactly be new to him, but he wasn’t exactly familiar with the concept of someone doing that to another human being just because they wanted to rather than it being part of a dietary requirement of their species...

“Zach will have the odontologist at the Jeffersonian take a look, but I’m right,” Bones confirmed, nodding at him.

“A cannibal,” the sheriff repeated, looking uncomfortably at her despite the half-eaten sandwich that was still partly in his mouth. “You mean a... Hannibal Lecter-type deal?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Bones said, looking briefly back at the sheriff.

“And we’re certain a human being gnawed on that bone?” Booth asked, waving a hand slightly to draw attention to the central issue, briefly reflecting once again on the irony of working with someone with less knowledge of popular culture than he had; even he’d heard of Thomas Harris’s novels during his ‘guilt phase’- as people who knew his history tended to refer to the years between him gaining his soul and meeting Buffy-, although he’d found Lecter’s character to be too similar to Angelus for comfort given his culinary tastes and manipulative ability to relate to people.

“Bit, gnawed, removed the flesh,” Bones said, her tone demonstrating an almost disturbingly vampire nonchalance as she shrugged off any concerns about specifics of the relevant terms.

“That’s... that’s really not good,” the sheriff muttered, looking at his sandwich in evident distaste.

“Are you sure, Bones?” Booth asked, hoping that he wasn’t dealing with what the current facts suggested; cannibalism was too close to his own past crimes for him to be fully comfortable with this situation. “You’ve never seen anything like this before-”

“Of course I’ve seen this before,” Bones replied dismissively. “I did grad work among the Warri of the Amazon; they have a long history of cannibalism. I’ve also seen evidence of cannibalism in some 12th century Native American sites. It’s not a big deal.”

“Have you ever...?” the sheriff asked, pointing uncertainly at his mouth as he looked uncomfortably at Bones.

“I’ve never been offered human flesh before,” Bones replied.

“But... what if you had?” Booth asked in a low voice, almost hoping Bones wouldn’t answer; the implications if she said yes were _really_ disturbing...

“It’s an interesting question,” Bones replied, nodding in a brief, thoughtful manner. “I would have to measure my own social inclination against scientific inquiry.”

“OK...” Booth said after a moment’s pause, noting the equally-disturbed expression on the sheriff’s face. “That’s sick.”

“You know, maybe we’re looking for someone who needs to be rescued,” Bones continued, completely ignoring his discomfort. “Maybe... the young man died, and the missing girl, hungry and lost, came upon him; needing food, she-”

“Sawed him up... and... barbequed him,” the sheriff finished, looking over at her apprehensively as Booth removed his sunglasses to study one of the ‘Missing’ posters of the girl in question.

“There was no evidence that the hand was cooked,” Bones responded, looking uncertainly at the sheriff as though wondering if he knew something she didn’t.

“She does _not_ look like the type of girl that would chew on raw flesh,” Booth put in, shaking his head at that train of thought; the last thing he wanted was to start suspecting an innocent girl of willingly resorting to cannibalism.

“You would be surprised,” Bones replied with a nod, ignoring the slight sound of the sheriff apparently swallowing back the urge to vomit. “When survival instincts kick in-”

“OK,” Booth cut in, putting the poster back inside the car, “if it isn’t her, then we’re dealing with some psycho cannibal killer.”

“This is sick...” the sheriff muttered

Booth couldn’t help but agree with that assessment, and matters weren’t helped when Bones pointed out that someone eating human flesh would _get_ sick; why someone would eat something that would make them ill he didn’t know and wasn’t sure he wanted to learn.

The spiritual depravity he’d witnessed as Angel as Wolfram & Hart lawyers were willing to literally sign away their souls for power had been sick, but at least they knew they were getting something out of the deal- even if he hadn’t agreed with their decisions-; what this person was doing was just... _disgusting_.

* * *

  
“Look,” the sheriff said, as they approached the park ranger’s house a few hours later, the new information about the victim’s possible identity having led them to the ranger in question, “I’ve known Sherman for years; I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with this.”

Booth simply stood in silence alongside Bones as the sheriff knocked on the door before them, the overweight form of the park ranger coming to the door shortly afterwards.

“Hey sheriff,” Sherman replied.

“Hey, Sherman,” the sheriff responded, removing his hat as he walked through the door. “Mind if we come in?”

“You guys here about the cannibal?” Sherman asked nonchalantly as Booth and Bones followed the sheriff in.

“We can’t talk about official business,” the sheriff replied briefly before either of the others could react. “How’s about some tea?”

“Sure,” Sherman said, closing the door and heading off to the kitchen as the sheriff sat down in a nearby chair.

“What did you do that for?” Booth asked, leaning over to whisper at the sheriff.

“Give you a chance to look around, get a sense of the man,” the sheriff replied, waving his hand briefly as he leant back in the chair and closed his eyes.

“The raven spirit,” Bones said, indicating a sculpture above the fireplace before Booth could begin his own search. “In some Native American stories it has a cannibalistic elem-”

Further conversation was cut off at the sound of a bang in the kitchen, a brief glance all Booth needed to confirm his theory about what had happened.

“He went out back,” he said, glancing over in frustration at the sheriff. “Give me your flashlight.”

“No way you’ll catch Sherman Rivers in the woods,” the sheriff replied, his nonchalance as he tossed the flashlight over to Booth leaving the ex-vampire frustrated even as he ran out of the hut.

“Just search the place!” he yelled back at the hut, diving into the darkened woods, the flashlight shining ahead of him, wishing that he’d retained his vampiric senses in the transition back to human; his night vision might be good by human standards, but his vampire eyes had naturally evolved to cope with far less light than this...

“Sherman, _stop_!” he yelled, knowing that it was a futile effort even as he spoke but needing to try nevertheless as he tried to spot the man he was currently chasing, the only sign of his presence being a sudden splashing sound as he ran through what seemed to be a narrow stream of some kind.

“STOP!” he yelled again, aiming his gun at Sherman as he drew in closer to his target, only for Sherman to run off into a deeper part of the wood before he could do anything with it.

“You gotta be kidding me...” Booth muttered as the flashlight died, frustrated beyond belief at the way this whole mess had turned out.

There were definitely times where he felt like he might have been better remaining Shanshu-less; he could have _definitely_ caught that guy if he was still a vampire...

* * *

  
Sitting in their selected bar after Rigby’s capture and imprisonment, Booth made a mental note to check if there was some scientific term for what seemed to occupy most of Bones’s thoughts when he got back; thinking this much about murders could _not_ be healthy.

“And to think,” Bones said, as she finished stirring her coffee, “I didn’t want to come here with you. I mean, this was a fascinating case; you don’t often find ritual cannibalism practiced so close to home-”

“Which I find a plus-” Booth commented, tipping salt over his eggs.

“There are always those individuals within a species who are driven to break the most basic taboos,” Bones continued, as though he’d never spoken in the first place. “I mean, Rigby actually ate human flesh-”

“Bones,” Booth protested, swallowing down the urge to throw up at the reference- even Angelus had never been wild about cannibalism, preferring to drink the blood rather than chew on the flesh, but as Booth it almost made him physically ill-, “I just got my steak and eggs-”

“Rigby has a prion disease which means he’s been a cannibal for quite some time,” Bones continued, actually taking a sip of orange juice as she spoke. “Do you realize when we go to trial he could use the insanity defence?”

“The guy _is_ nuts-” Booth pointed out (Why couldn’t the woman take a hint; even at her worst Cordelia had at least _acknowledged_ what others were talking about even if she only responded enough to cut them off from anything that wasn’t about her).

“Yes,” Bones confirmed with a brief yet broad smile, “but is it nuts because he got a brain disease from eating human flesh, _or_ was he already nuts the first time he ate flesh, _or_ did he just lick his fingers after surgery?”

“I should just become a vegetarian...” Booth muttered, pushing his plate away and sipping at his coffee.

“Or, as an alternative, just don’t eat people,” Bones said casually.

Taking advantage of the momentary silence, Booth reached over to apply ketchup to his food- at least the texture didn’t _look_ like blood- before continuing with his meal.

“You know,” Bones continued, taking a forkful of her own food, “I’m going come back up here this winter; Charlie says the skiing is great.”

“Oh, _Charlie_?” Booth repeated.

“Yeah, the overnight guy,” Bones said by way of explanation.

“I know who he is...” Booth replied, allowing himself a briefly amused grin at her unawareness of his own thoughts (And something he _really_ didn’t want to consider when things with Tessa were currently at least stable).

“I bet he’s a great skier,” Bones said, as she took a quick mouthful. “His hips and thighs are perfectly developed for strength and maneuverability.”

Booth wasn’t sure what frustrated him more as he pushed his plate away; the fact that Bones could make a comment like that and realistically regard it as a compliment, or the fact that she genuinely didn’t realise how a statement like that could sound to other people.

There were times when he really wondered what he’d done to become love’s bitch...

Then he wondered where _that_ thought had come from.


	6. A Boy in a Bush

There were definitely times when Booth wondered why he'd wanted to become human for so long, and the current case was unquestionably one of them; the thought of someone being capable of _killing_ a little kid like Charlie Sanders just made him feel almost as ill as he had when he realised Wolfram & Hart had been trying to trick him into killing Connor by 'spicing' his glasses of blood...

Ironically, the current avenue of investigation he was pursuing- studying camera footage of the mall where Charlie had last been seen- helped him almost draw back from the issue; looking for the kid like this was still a bit ghoulish, but video images had never entirely had the same effect on him as actual corpses (Possibly because a part of him still remembered the days when images of people were just paintings; it helped him 'draw back' from the reality of what he was seeing and focus more on the visual implications than the thought that he was watching the last actions of a dead kid).

"There are twenty surveillance cameras taking stills every two seconds throughout the mall including access corridors and parking lots," Angela explained, drawing his attention back to the issue at hand as she moved the mouse to indicate the images on the computer monitor in front of Bones as he stood behind them. "I concentrated on the ones aimed at the public concourse."

"OK..." he said, looking uncertainly at the shots before him. "Ten thousand people a day go through that mall; how are we going to find one small kid?"

"Angela designed a mass recognition program to apply body types to skeletal remains," Bones answered, standing up to better indicate the diagram currently on screen, displaying a green transparent body with various arrows around it that presumably indicated something Booth didn't understand at this point.

"Endomorph, Ectomorph, Mesomorph… that sort of thing," Angela said, shaking her head dismissively as one of the camera feeds on the computer screen was suddenly enlarged as the computer apparently began to scan the image for one of the kids. "I modified it to scan two dimensional images; in this case, we're looking for body masses roughly congruent with Charlie, Sean, and David; there's David," she added, indicating a highlighted body on the current screen, standing beside a girl near what looked like a jewellery stall.

Booth wasn't sure what shocked him more; the fact that Angela- the one he'd always seen as the 'normal' squint in the same way that Gunn and Xander had always been the 'normal' members of his and Buffy's teams- could sound so 'squint-ish', or the fact that he was suddenly reminded of Fred.

It wasn't immediately obvious, of course- Fred had lacked any kind of serious _artistic_ talent and had definitely been a lot less assertive than Angela was when it came to relationships-, but the similarities were there, particularly in their similarly-loose clothing styles (Even if Angela tended to show more skin than Fred)...

"You're actually one of them, aren't you?" he said, deciding that the first thought was the safer one to voice right now.

"One of who?" Angel asked, glancing briefly back at him.

"A squint," Booth answered, ignoring Bones's brief glance back at him as he spoke. "I mean, you look normal, and you act normal, but... you're actually one of them."

"This whole mass recognition program was Brennan's idea," Angela replied briefly, her eyes remaining fixed on the screen as she spoke. "I'm completely normal, really."

"Yeah, maybe before you got this job," Booth said, shrugging slightly as he looked at her. "But now..."

"I see Charlie," Bones said after a moment's pause, pointing at a green figure on the screen walking by a shop window.

"That's him alright..." Booth muttered, staring intently at the small boy before him, suddenly not that much bigger than Parker (Estimating height from the bodies he brought Bones to ID was never something he was comfortable doing; he was never certain how much muscle and skin had to play in height)...

"Oh God..." Angela whispered, her voice so low Booth almost didn't hear her.

"Ang?" Bones asked, looking over at her friend. "Are you OK?"

"These are probably the last pictures of this little... guy alive," the artist said in a low voice. "Why is he alone? Why isn't anyone with him?"

Booth was about to say something when Angela sighed.

"I'm sorry," she said simply, as she reached over to tap at the keyboard. "The max resolution is 640 by 480 pixels per square inch..."

"Ah, wait," Booth said, staring intently at the screen as it showed Charlie running towards someone concealed from the camera by a large red banner hanging down from the room. "He's not alone, someone's calling him over? Can't you just zoom in?"

"The fewer pixels that make up an image the more the picture degrades once we zoom in on it," Angela explained, before she exhaled uncomfortably. "Did that sound too squinty?"

"Any way to enhance it?" Bones asked, clearly trying to bring the conversation back to a more relevant discussion than definitions of 'squint-ness'.

"I wouldn't bet a date with Colin Farrell on it," Angela replied.

"I know him," Bones said, pointing at Angela with a slightly satisfied tone in her voice, clearly relieved to have understood a pop culture reference for once. "He's funny."

"Funny is Will Ferrell, sweetie," Angela replied with a slightly exasperated tone as though she'd had this and similar arguments with Bones before. " _Hot_ is Colin Farrell."

"Alright," Booth said, indicating the screen as Charlie began to run towards somebody else, concealed from the camera view behind a red mall flag of some kind, "look, the kid is definitely moving towards someone, alright? He wasn't struggling, he wasn't trying to get away- you know," he added, a thought occurring to him after the recent interviews, "I want to add the neighbourhood kid, Skyler Nelson, to the list of possible suspects."

"I have one other angle," Angela said, tapping the keyboard to shift the view to another, higher camera even as her tone reflected her uncertainty about the usefulness of her latest contribution, "but our bad guy's still obstructed in it."

Staring at the screen showing the soon-to-be-deceased Charlie Brooks walking off with an unseen figure who was almost certainly his murderer, Booth wondered who the Hell could be sick enough to do something like that to a _kid_...

* * *

  
"OK," Booth said as he walked into one of the Jeffersonian's computer labs, his eyes instantly falling on Zach and Angela sitting in front of the screen, "anything on the identity of Charlie's abductor?"

"I can't clear up this image any more than it is," Angela said, indicating the screen's current image of what looked like part of the back of somebody's head being concealed by something else, indicating Zach with a brief wave of her hand as she began typing once again. "Tell Booth what you told me about living in Hodgins's garage."

"There's a bedroom, living room, kitchen, another bedroom, a den, two bathrooms-" Zach began, his neutral tone not giving any hint about whether or not he found the garage he was describing to be excessive in any regard.

"OK," Booth said, increasingly unnerved at the description of a property scale that sounded far more expensive than someone should be able to afford after spending their days going through slime, dirt and bugs, "great, quite a garage; can we focus on the case?"

"How many cars does he have in that garage?" Angela asked, apparently preferring this new mystery to their original one (Of course, Booth had to admit that the chance of getting information about Hodgins _was_ looking like it would be more likely than their chances of getting information about Charlie's killer...).

"Including the antique ones, about twelve," Zach replied. " _And_ a boat."

"Zach has never seen the main house because the tennis courts and the pond block the view," Angela added, looking back at Booth with a brief smile.

"Whoa..." Booth muttered, an explanation for the inconsistency between Hodgins's profession and his living accommodations suddenly occurring to him. "He must be one of _those_ Hodgins's."

"Who are those Hodgins's?" Zach asked.

"The Cantilever group Hodgins," Booth answered (He hoped he'd gotten the name right, anyway; he'd found a few files on the Cantilever group both from some old FBI case files and a couple of forms at Wolfram & Hart- he'd focused more on demon law while leaving Gunn to deal with the human issues, but that didn't mean he'd neglected his human clients-, but it had been a while since he'd studied anything about them in depth).

"Oh my God..." Angela whispered, after a moment's silence as the other two processed this revelation.

"The same Cantilever group that generates more G&P than Europe?" Zach asked.

"Get this," Angela added. "They're the single biggest donors to the Jeffersonian Institution."

"Ha!" Booth said, unable to stop himself from grinning broadly at the implications of that particular bit of news. "That makes Hodgins your _boss_!"

The laugh trailed off somewhat as Zach and Angela looked back at him with an expression that made him feel momentarily like he'd said something stupid, but that thought passed almost as soon as it had come as another laugh at the sheer humour of the situation passed his lips.

"What do you guys even talk about when he drives you to work?" Angela asked, once against working at her keyboard as though the brief revelation hadn't happened.

"I mostly sleep," Zach replied, as the camera footage on the screen shifted to show people walking glass doors. "Hodgins mostly yells at the radio."

"OK," Booth said, a thought occurring to him as he looked at the new image- possibly inspired by his own increased awareness of his reflection; ever since he'd regained his humanity that was one feature that had always slightly caught him off-guard whenever he saw it-, "if you can't see the guy's face, maybe you could grab a reflection?"

There was a moment's silence, and then Zach turned around to look at him.

"That's a workable idea," he said, his tone expressing some slight incredulity.

"Well," Booth said, unable to keep the discomfort out of his voice, "I'd say 'thanks'... you know, if you didn't say it like it was some kind of a _miracle_."

He tried to shrug it off as Angela looked at him with a brief smile before she turned back to the computer, but he couldn't help but feel slightly resentful of it; he might be helping people in his new life, but he really wished that the people he spent the most time with recently actually recognised more often that he was more than just the guy with the badge who got them into places...

* * *

  
As he walked into the lab where Bones currently stood silently staring at Charlie's bones, Booth tried not to look too closely at the small bones on the table before him; the image invoked too many memories of Parker for his comfort, particularly after the way things had fallen apart with Connor in his old life...

"Bones," he said, trying to focus on the reason he'd come to this room in the first place, "I thought you'd like to know, Sean and David are in emergency care. I pulled some strings, made sure that they... get to stay together."

"That's good, thanks," Bones replied, not even looking up at him as she wrote something on her clipboard.

"Best I could do," Booth continued, wishing she'd react more to his statement.

"Yeah, I understand," Bones replied in the same tone as before.

"You _say_ you understand, but you don't, not really," Booth said, his patience rapidly approaching breaking point as he turned back to her, placing his hand on the table as he spoke; he vaguely registered something breaking, but didn't pay much attention to it. "I mean, if you don't like the rule, you ignore it, right? I can't have that, and if you want to do this-"

"Do what?" Bones asked as she removed her gloves.

"Work on cases; you know, with me outside the lab?" Booth elaborated (He knew it was slightly hypocritical of him to be talking about the law after he'd spent so long operating outside it, but that was when he was dealing with the supernatural; his old enemies had completely _existed_ outside the law, but his current ones required a more legal approach). "If you want to do that, I _need_ to know that you will respect the law."

"Tell you what," Bones said, looking downwards for a moment before looking back at him, "if I can't respect the law, I can at least respect you."

"Oh," Booth said, momentarily embarrassed at the anthropologist's statement as he tried to collect himself- he wasn't used to people saying that they specifically had faith in _him_ since Cordelia had paid him that final visit-, "yeah, that'll work too. I mean, it kind of comes out of nowhere, but..."

He trailed off as he noticed Bones staring at his right hand as it rested on the desk, prompting him to glance down and note that his hand was resting on a wooden pencil that had been broken into three pieces when he'd pressed down on it.

"Look what you did..." she said, in a low voice that could have meant anything when attached to that sentence.

"It's a pencil," Booth said in confusion. "I'll get you a new one..."

"The victim was killed by trauma to the chest," Bones continued, turning back to thoughtfully study the skeleton lying on the table behind her, "but the ribs are broken in two places, not just one."

"Because of the, uh..." Booth said, faltering for a moment as he tried to remember the technical term- back when he'd been Angel multiple broken bones was an indicator of the strength of the demon they were hunting rather than physical weakness this kind of thing was never necessity-, "brittle bones, because of his disease-"

"Well, that was my assumption, but there's another explanation," Bones said, moving to leave the lab only to be halted as he stepped in front of her.

"OK, whoa," he said, holding up a hand to halt her progress, "what's the other explanation?"

"Compression," Bones replied briefly before walking past him out into the hallway, leaving him to simply follow on after her.

"Alright, Charlie Sanders was _crushed_ to death?" he asked, wondering what was more terrible; the fact that someone could do that to a kid, or the fact that he could imagine what kind of mentality could do something like that for _fun_...

"Yes, greenstick fractures retebral and sternal," Bones replied, turning to face him with the pencil in her hand. "See?"

"All right," Booth said, trying to get the situation back on target, "Sean Cook outweighed Charlies Sanders by about what; maybe thirty pounds? How could he have crushed him to death?"

"Angela," Bones said, calling the artist over to talk to her as they walked, "we need to run some scenarios through the Angelanator."

Booth was just moving to walk after Bones when the sounds of Hodgins calling them prompted him and Angela to stop walking, turning around to see the shorter man running up behind them with a slightly urgent expression.

"Zach has been informed that if he tells anyone who I am that I will kick him out on the street like a stray dog," Hodgins said in a low voice, audible to Booth and Angela while remaining out of earshot of anyone passing them by. "Sadly, there's nothing I can threaten you two with."

"Yeah, that's a shame," Angela said; Booth wondered how Hodgins would react if he knew what kind of threats Booth was capable of putting into action if he wanted to...

"What I want out of my life," Hodgins continued, "is to come in here and sift through slime and bugs. Unfortunately, my family is one of those who secretly run the world."

"Paranoia and delusions of grandeur all in one package..." Booth muttered with a reflectively amused smile as he turned around and walked off towards the lab with Angela.

"You call it paranoia, I call it the family business- please, could you just stop?!" Hodgins called after them, prompting both of them to turn back around and look at Hodgins again.

"The reason that I do not want to go to that banquet," the entomologist continued, looking almost pleading between Booth and Angela, ""is because the other members of the ruling elite will make a big fuss about seeing me. My secret will be out and my life…this life that I love, will be ruined. I'm asking you, please… please just let me be Jack Hodgins who works in the lab."

Despite the complete lack of resemblance between the two, as he looked at the smaller man before him, Booth couldn't help but suddenly be reminded of himself back on his first 'stint' as a human.

Admittedly, he might have 'acted out' against his family in a more extreme manner than Hodgins was- he'd rebelled by going out, getting plastered and having lots of sex while Hodgins rebelled by spending his spare time examining mud, slime, crap and bugs-, but the point remained fundamentally valid; both of them had been born into lives that neither of them had wanted and that they'd constantly sought to escape.

As he and Angela walked away, Booth made a mental note to see if he could arrange something to keep Hodgins occupied the night of the banquet...

* * *

  
"We have him cold," Booth said as he walked into Bones's office later that night, the results of the tests on Nelson's insecticide equipment combined with Sean Cook's testimony having provided everything they needed to put the man away. "The insecticide he was using on the termites matches the Fluoride concentration perfectly. Skyler's dad admitted everything."

"Don't tell me," Bones said, studying the file on her hands with a grimly negative tone to her voice as she walked around behind her desk. "He said crushing Charlie to death was a mistake."

"He never abused Sean Cook; he just used him to get near Charlie," Booth continued, trying to push thoughts of the man's motives to the back of his mind; Angelus might have tortured and killed kids when he was younger, but even he'd never gone as far as sexual assault (Although in Angelus's case that was because he'd never understood the appeal as far as what _he_ was supposed to get out of it rather than any actual morality). "It played out just like you said; he had Charlie out in that field, some teenage kids they come by so he knelt on Charlie to keep him from crying out. Sean got scared, he ran back to his brother."

"Charlie was small and weak," Bones concluded as she turned to look at him, sorrow evident on her face at the thought of that little boy who would now never have the chance to grow up. "His sternum collapsed...."

As she sat down at her desk, Bones was silent for a moment before she continued again. "You think he abused any other kids?"

"Yeah," Booth said grimly, wishing there was some way he could erase that thought from his mind. "Probably his own son."

"You report that to child services?" Bones asked, still staring at her screen.

"Mmm," Booth nodded briefly. "Trying to get the kid some help... and I'm sorry."

"For what?" Bones asked, looking at him with a gaze that looked like she was fighting back the urge to cry.

"You have personal experience in the system," he said by way of explanation.

For a moment there was simply silence in the office, until Bones finally spoke.

"I was a foster child," she said, slowly and uncertainly, clearly uncomfortable with this topic even if she was still discussing it, "until my grandfather got me out."

"Yeah..." Booth continued, partly uncertain if he should continue this line of inquiry but simultaneously sensing that stopping now would prevent this topic ever coming up again, "when you said... they take you away from your brother... I kind of had the feeling you weren't talking about David Cook."

"Booth," Bones said after a moment's pause, standing up from her seat even as she continued to stare at the computer screen before her, "I'll tell you all about it one day, but tonight, I have to get dressed for a party."

"OK, Bones," Booth replied, turning to leave in the knowledge that he'd already received all the information he was going to get out of her for tonight.

"By the way," Bones added, her voice now its usual, more casual tone, "there's a huge ding in my passenger side door because you told me not to park it at an angle."

Despite himself, Booth couldn't help but chuckle slightly at that news.

"OK, that's just mean!" Bones yelled, standing up sharply to stare at him, the tension from earlier pushed aside as though it had never been. "You're mean!"

"Sorry," Booth replied as he walked out, unable to stop himself from chuckling as he did so; the image of a world-renowned forensic anthropologist acting like a little kid calling another kid a 'meanie' was just _too_ amusing for words...


	7. A Man in a Wall

Standing silently in his office as he turned over the latest case in his mind, briefly skimming over the file in his hands without fully taking it in, Booth wondered how long it would be before he actually figured out what he was dealing with this time around. It seemed like a relatively straightforward drugs case so far- DJ Mount got caught up in drug dealings and it ended up becoming bigger than he'd initially anticipated-, but if he'd learned anything from that incident with the Prio Motu demon guardian it was that he couldn't afford to form split-second assessments when people's lives were involved...

"Agent Booth?" a voice said, prompting him to turn around and take in the new arrival; a dark-skinned man in his forties dressed in a dark green jacket and a light blue shirt, carrying what looked like an old shoebox.

"Yeah?" he asked.

"I'm Roy Taylor's father," the man said, his gaze remaining fixed on the agent before him. "Maybe you know him as DJ Mount?"

"Mr Taylor," Booth replied, nodding briefly at him in acknowledgement. "Please come in."

"Thank you for seeing me," Mr Taylor replied as he walked into the room.

"Please, sit," Booth continued, sitting down behind his desk as Mr Taylor sat down opposite him.

"You're the one looking into my son's murder?" he asked.

"Investigating his death, yes, sir," Booth replied, taking care to phrase it diplomatically; even on his worst days as Angel, he'd known that telling someone outright that you believed their son had died because of their own mistakes was never a good start. "I'm... sorry for your loss."

"I have some information you need," Mr Taylor said after a moment's silence.

"About your son's death?" Booth asked curiously.

"No sir," Mr Taylor replied, placing the shoebox he'd been carrying on Booth's desk. "About his life. I've been reading in the newspaper how my son was part of the meth scene. How he was killed by drugs behind a wall... like that."

Pausing for a moment as he opened the box, Mr Taylor removed a picture frame and placed it on the desk before Booth, revealing a young man dressed for a graduation holding a diploma with a broad smile on his face (The resemblance to the image Angela had produced with the Angelator was uncanny; Booth could _never_ get used to technology's ability to do something like that).

"What my son _did_ ," Mr Taylor continued, staring pointedly at Booth as he spoke, "was graduate third in his class from high school. He would of graduated first, except he..."

He paused for a moment, briefly lost in painful memories before he continued. "He worked a full time job."

Reaching back into the box, he removed a few medal and placed them on the desk, followed by a small trophy.

"Track and field medals, baseball," he said by way of explanation, indicating the items in question. "Roy never drank, and he _never_ did drugs. Do you understand me, sir?"

"Mr Taylor..." Booth began; a father's defence of his son was a fine thing in theory, but he'd learned the hard way during that mess with Connor that sometimes children could let you down no matter how hard you tried.

"How they are portraying my boy in the newspapers is wrong!" Mr Taylor said, his tone making it clear that he would accept no argument. "If his mother was alive it would kill her. I taught him a relationship with Jesus. Do you understand, sir? A _personal_ relationship with Jesus."

"With all due respect, sir," Booth began- he wasn't sure if he was talking about his relationship with Connor before he'd had the spell cast or his own relationship with _his_ father (Liam's father rather than Seeley's; Seeley had left home to stay with his grandfather as soon as he could)-, "sometimes when kids grow up, they change, they move away from what they were taught-"

Holding up a finger to halt Booth mid-sentence, Mr Taylor reached back into the box and pulled out a small, blue ceramic hand-print, holding it up so that it was facing Booth.

"Five years old, he made this," Mr Taylor explained, looking at the small ceramic with a grim smile. "And a lady who reads palms, she looked at it and she said..."

He paused for a moment, evidently fighting the need to cry as he thought of the son that he'd lost, before he continued speaking. "She said my boy was going to be a great man... a _good_ man... she read no evil in that boy's hand."

Taking the ceramic for a moment, Booth briefly stared at it- palm-reading wasn't something he'd ever put in any faith in whatever name he was going by at the time, but Mr Taylor's sheer _faith_ in his son was something that he couldn't exactly overlook- before he looked back at the man before him with a brief, solemn nod.

"I can see that now, sir," he said simply.

He might have seen and told so many lies in his long lifetime, but there were some things that you just couldn't fake, and this man's clear faith in his son was one of them.

"Some inequity killed my boy," Mr Taylor said after a moment's pause, tears trickling down his face as he spoke. "You know that word, Agent Booth? It's from the Bible."

"Deliver me... from the workers of inequity... and save me from bloody men," Booth recalled, passing the ceramic back to Mr Taylor as he recalled the words he'd first heard so long ago, in a church service he'd had no interest in attending due to the expectations it created that he had no plans to fulfil...

He might have been a failure back when he was first alive at living up to his father's expectations, but that was because they'd mainly been _forced_ on him rather than just taught to him.

"You know your Psalms, sir," Mr Taylor said, taking the ceramic back and putting it away with a brief sniff before he looked resolutely back at Booth. "I can trust that you will find out what happened to my boy."

"Yes sir," Booth replied with a brief nod.

With the evident faith this man had had in his son taken into account...

It might not be _impossible_ for the original theory to be the correct one, but it was almost certainly a lot less likely than it had been.

Maybe if he'd had a father like Mr Taylor back when he'd been Liam, he wouldn't have ended up dead...

* * *

  
As he shrugged on his new shirt that Tessa had brought for him- vampirism had actually been a lot easier on his daily wardrobe, really; he might have occasionally ended up with holes in a fight, but sweat had been one of the bodily functions his body _didn't_ continue after its physical demise-, Booth was only partly paying attention to Angela's current interest in his and Tessa's current holiday plans as they discussed the situation in the Jeffersonian 'lounge'.

"Jamacia?" Angela said to Tessa as he began to button up his shirt (Givn his current relationship with Tessa and Angela's own rather liberal attitude, being shy about anything seemed rather superfluous at this point). "God, that's incredible."

"Mmm," Tessa nodded slightly in agreement. "It's a bed and breakfast. There are these coral reefs..."

"Snorkling, kayaking..." Booth added, looking upwards slightly wistfully at the thought; the whole tale about running water being anathema to vampires might be a myth- unless the water was blessed, of course; that trick Buffy had done in Vegas when she had a priest bless the water in the sprinkler system to take out a casino full of vampires had definitely been a _very_ original solution to the problem-, but it wasn't exactly practical to do either of those things at night, so he'd never been able to participate in those activities as a vampire...

"Oh, you two are so ready for the pre-shacking up test vacation," Angela said, smiling at them.

"What do you mean?" Booth asked, his mind briefly flashing back to any conversation he'd had with Buffy, Cordelia or Willow- the only person he'd felt remotely comfortable discussing his relationship with Buffy with back in the old days in Sunnydale- regarding relationships; had he missed a rule or something about vacations?

"You have keys to each other's places," Angela explained. "You've done the weekend away a couple of times. Yeah, it's time for the ten day vacation. You know, Jamaica is like a dry run for living together only with Rum punch and steel drums."

With that last- and in Booth's opinion random- comment, Angela turned and walked off, leaving Booth and Tessa looking awkwardly between the departing artist and each other; Booth definitely didn't recall _anyone_ mentioning that 'rule' back in his time as Angel, but then again he'd never gone further than having someone over for the weekend when he was dating Buffy and Nina...

"Living together... that's silly," Tessa said, looking back at him and drawing his attention back to the moment.

"Thanks," Booth began, before realising that his current response- thanking her for her lack of interest in moving in; he didn't want to act like the idea was _bad_ , he just wasn't sure about it _yet_ \- could be taken the wrong way and changing it to, "...for bringing me a shirt."

"Yeah, OK," Tessa said. "I'll talk to you later."

With that, Tessa turned around and walked off down another exit, exchanging brief hellos with Bones before she continued towards the stairs, Bones walking into the lounge to join him.

"It's Eve Warren," she said.

"Eve Warren," Booth repeated, slinging his tie around his neck and grabbing his jacket as he followed Bones towards the lab. "OK, cause of death?"

"Same as Mount," Bones replied.

"Meth overdose?"

"Pushed in the face," Bones confirmed. "But there's more; I don't think that Rulz killed her."

"She was buried under his studio," Booth began, wondering what he was missing to allow for that statement to make sense.

"But her wrists were broken," Bones responded, which left Booth no further along in understanding what Bones was talking about even as he continued walking after her, hoping that she'd elaborate on that last, seemingly irrelevant statement sooner rather than later...

* * *

  
"You did not murder Eve Warren," Bones said as she walked around the interview table to stand opposite DJ Rulz, the former prime suspect in the case whose likelihood of being the killer was rapidly going downhill in Booth's eyes.

"This is a weird kind of interrogation, huh?" Rulz said with a brief grin. "Cops telling me what I didn't do?"

"Well then," Booth said, a slight smile on his face as he walked up- this guy might think he was good at twisting words in his own way, but Angelus had been a _master_ at making people think and say what they didn't want to-, "do me a favour; tell me Bones is wrong and confess to a murder, huh?"

"Hell no, man," Rulz said, staring at him incredulously. "What; you think I'm some type of _idiot_?"

"Well, do me a favour, deny it," Booth countered.

"Ah, see, you got tricks," Rulz said, pointing at Booth with an 'enlightened' smile. "You're going to twist all my words around, so I better not say anything at all."

"You didn't kill Eve Warren," Bones repeated.

"So you say," Rulz said, folding his arms as he stared silently ahead of himself. "The Rulz says, say nothing."

Booth couldn't stop himself from laughing slightly as he realised what Rulz was doing here, memories of Gunn's comments about rap music- he hadn't listened to it much but when you lived in the same building as someone for the better part of three years you tended to pick things up even without vampiric hearing- automatically springing to mind.

"He wants us to hold him," he said with an amused grin.

"Why?" Bones asked in confusion.

"Why?" Booth repeated, smiling over at her. "Because every time some rapper gets murdered his business goes straight through the roof."

"You know, why should DJ Mount get the bump, huh?" Rulz said, nodding slightly at Booth in confirmation. "Maybe it's my turn."

"I'll tell you what," Booth said, hoping he remembered Gunn's comments on rappers accurately, "I'll make you a better deal. You tell us what we need to know and I'll have those charges laid against you; put you in the Remand center."

"For how long?" Rulz asked with a brief smile.

"Well, that depends on what you tell us-" Booth replied.

"Wait, wait," Bones said, looking between the two in confusion. "You're negotiating to put this guy _in_ jail?"

"I'll sweeten the pot and charge you with Mount's death too," Booth added as he sat on the edge of the table, ignoring Bones for the moment, "but you hire one of those moron lawyers and you'll be thrown in lockup for, what, maybe a month?"

"Sweet," Rulz replied with a smile.

"What am I, in backwards world?" Bones asked in frustration (Booth made a note to compliment her on that last statement; that was the most non-squinty phrase he'd heard her use yet that he could recall).

"What do you got?" Booth asked.

"Look," Rulz replied, "I could tell you all why Mount got killed but you all have to figure out the rest on your own."

"We have to figure it out just from motive?" Bones asked, sitting down in the seat at the opposite side of the interview table as though trying to collect herself.

"Hey, Bones," Booth said, turning to look at her in slight frustration, "this is, y'know, sorta my thing."

As Bones lowered her eyes in acknowledgement of the last statement, Booth turned back to look at Rulz, hoping that this gambit would pay off.

"Mount was gonna jump," Rulz said.

"You mean commit suicide?" Bones cut in, prompting Rulz to shoot her the same 'are you dumb?' expression Booth had grown so used to experiencing in the early days of his partnership with Bones before he turned to Booth.

"Where did you find her?" he asked incredulously.

"Museum," Booth replied briefly, prompting Rulz to nod in understanding before he turned back to look at Bones.

"I mean _labels_ ," he stated. "Jump _labels_."

Booth couldn't help but laugh sceptically at that response; it was such a simple explanation he couldn't believe it hadn't occurred earlier.

"You're saying that DJ Mount was going to leave Basement Records?" he asked.

"Look," Rulz said with a shrug, "all he needed was the money to buy himself back, that's why he got himself killed. Now if Hall even finds out that I told you all that much, I'm going to end up some dried out mummy in a wall."

"But what about Eve?" Bones asked.

"Man, Eve couldn't kill nobody," Rulz replied with an incredulous smile. "Y'know, sex 'em to death, maybe, but that's about it. Oh, and there's one more thing; the next day, Hall built me a new studio. He took it out of my money too."

Booth had to admit, that part about the timing of the construction of the studio _did_ seem too providential to be coincidental...

"So, you gonna put me in jail?" Rulz asked after a brief pause.

"Hey, well, you know what?" Booth replied, exchanging a satisfied nod with Rulz as he spoke. "It's the least we can do."

They had a motive, and they _definitely_ had enough for a suspect; all they needed now was a reason to question the suspect...

* * *

  
"Yeah, we know you did it," Booth said, lounging on a couch in Hall's club as he idly scanned through a magazine in front of him, keeping a peripheral note of Bones's presence in his mind as she stood off to the side in case things got ugly.

"What?" Randall Hall asked, with the same straightforward confidence that he'd encountered in so many of his enemies in his life.

"Killed Mount in that wall so he wouldn't leave the label," Booth responded, trying to remain professional to provoke a confession even as a part of him wanted to beat Hall to a pulp.

In the end, the more Booth learnt about Mount, the more he sympathised with the guy; all Mount had wanted to do was create a better life for himself and the woman he loved- much like he'd tried to do for Buffy and Darla when he'd left after graduation and when he'd taken those Trials respectively-, and this guy before him had killed Mount because of it.

"You killed Eve Warren," Bones added.

"Killed her, and buried her under Rulz's studio," Booth added, casually meeting Hall's glare as the club owner leaned over to stare at him in an attempted intimidation that wouldn't have worked even if he'd just been human; after staring down the likes of Hamilton and the Beast- even if he'd been Angelus in at least half of his direct confrontations with the Beast the point still stood-, a guy who needed a cane to walk wasn't that intimidating.

"In the meantime," he continued, indicating the area around him with a brief wave of his hand, " _this_ is going to have to remain an active crime scene."

"That's harassment," Hall said, walking over to stand more directly in front of Booth. "I'll sue."

"I'm going to harass you every chance I get," Booth countered, casually, only for Hall to suddenly poke Booth in the chest with the top part of his cane (The part that looked like a dog, Booth recalled).

"I'm not somebody you want to mess with," Hall said simply.

In that moment, Booth couldn't help but flash back to the first time he'd met that young Wolfram & Hart lawyer who'd become one of his most persistent enemies in Los Angeles.

" _I'm with Wolfram & Hart. Mr. Winters has never been accused and shall never be convicted of any crime–_ ever _. Should you continue to harass our client, we will be forced to bring you into the light of day... a place, I'm told, that isn't all that healthy for you_."

If Lindsey MacDonald couldn't intimidate him with a vampire that had hit at least the four-century milestone behind him, this guy _definitely_ wasn't going to pull it off.

"Did you just poke me?" he asked as he stood up, looking slightly incredulously over at Bones. "Did he just poke me with his little stick?"

"This is my place," Hall said simply. "I want to _poke_ somebody, I do it."

As far as Booth was concerned, that was enough. As soon as Hall moved to poke him again, Booth had grabbed the cane and twisted it out of his hands, subsequently spinning around as Oaks pulled a gun on him to grab the gun out of the undercover agent's hand before hitting him in the face with the top part of the cane. With both their opponents momentarily disabled, Booth tossed Oaks's gun to Bones and left her to aim it at the agent, leaving him to deal with Hall.

"All right," he said, casually pointing the cane at Hall, "how easily do you think I scare?"

"Hey, Booth!" Bones called over to him just as he was about to break the cane over his knee, "Don't break the cane; arrest him and confiscate the cane as evidence."

"What?" Booth asked in confusion at this sudden change of topic.

"I need the cane," Bones said, typically elaborating on her statement without actually elaborating on anything.

"Arrest him for what?" he asked, indicating Oaks as he continued. "He's the guy who pointed a gun at a federal agent."

"Uttering threats or smelling bad or anything," Bones said dismissively. "It's the cane we want."

"Fine, here," he said, handing the cane over to Bones- noting that he could just about get where she was coming from; the style of the head of Hall's cane _could_ account for that 'bone dimple' she'd mentioned earlier- before he pulled out a pair of handcuffs and spun Hall around. "Randall Hall, I'm placing you under arrest for the assault of a Federal agent."

"This will never go to court," Hall stated bluntly as he turned to look at Booth.

"Ah, let's go find out," Booth countered, before he turned to look at Oaks. "Next time I take your gun away from you, I'll shoot you with it."

"Well then, I better not let you get my gun again," Oaks replied, the two men sharing a brief smile before Booth turned and walked Hall out of the club, ignoring Bones's confused stare at their exchange; he'd fill her in on Oaks's true identity later.

The guy might not be a threat on the same scale as some of the villains he'd put down as Angel, but Booth had to admit to a certain satisfaction at seeing the frustratingly humbled expression on Hall's face as he was marched out of his own club...


	8. The Man on Death Row

"Bones," Booth said, shaking his head slightly in frustration as he walked through the lobby towards his office, Bones's latest attempt to apply for permission to use a gun having been completed and rejected- and he still couldn't quite get over that; he wasn't used to legally _denying_ people weapons-, "you don't need a gun. If anyone needs shooting, I'll do it."

He might not _want_ to be regarded as essentially the guy with the gun, of course- he might have been one of the better fighters on both of his old teams, but, as Wesley had said when he'd been feeling down about Groo's presence, he'd been his second group's central focus on getting involved in the fight in the first place-, but that didn't mean he didn't recognise the necessity of his presence...

"But what if you're injured or dead and someone still needs shooting?" Bones put in, sounding almost worryingly eager before she shifted to a more conciliatory tone. "I'm not hoping it will happen; I'm just... stating a possibility."

"Ah, come on," Booth muttered as he turned to look at her from the door of his office. "You know what, Bones? You're a professor, you're not an FBI agent, OK? Use your mutant powers, just talk people to death."

As soon as he turned around and saw the red-haired, suit-clad form of Amy Morton standing in his office, Booth knew that this day was just about to get more complicated.

In principle, he supposed that he could have liked Amy Morton- she might have a determined fanaticism about the law that he hadn't seen since Lilah, and even then she channelled her energy in a far more positive manner than Lilah ever had-, but the fact that she'd dedicated that drive towards defending some clients whom Booth was always fairly certain had committed the crimes they were accused of did little to endear her to him.

"Am I interrupting?" Amy asked with that casual tone that had always frustrated him.

"I told them not to let you in this building," Booth said, staring directly at the woman. "I gave them a picture."

"Which is why I wore the tiny skirt," Amy replied briefly.

"Very cute," Booth said, walking around behind his desk, trying to ignore Amy as she introduced herself to Bones.

"You work with Booth?" Amy asked after introductions had been dealt with.

"Yes, I'm a forensic anthropologist," Bones replied simply.

"I'm a defence lawyer," Amy replied with a slight smile. "I tend to work against Booth."

"If it's all the same," Booth cut in, pointing at Amy, "I'd prefer you two didn't bond in any way."

"Hey, I want to get back to the lab," Bones said, shrugging slightly as she looked back at him. "You said I could fill out some gun reapplication forms?"

"Here you go," Booth said, handing her the form in question; if he couldn't dissuade her from applying himself, maybe the persistent bureaucracy of it would make her give up. "Send it back by courier, no hurry."

"Nice to meet you," Bones said to Amy before she walked out of the office, leaving Booth to turn and look impatiently at his remaining visitor.

"What do you want, Amy?" he asked.

"You remember Howard Epps?" Amy countered.

"Not likely to forget him," Booth replied, sitting back against his desk as he looked at Amy; it might have been a while since he'd put the man in question in prison, but the memory of the brutality of the murder that Epps had been accused of didn't dim from time.

"He's scheduled to be executed tomorrow night," Amy said simply. "My job is to keep that from happening."

"Best of luck," Booth replied dismissively.

"Howard Epps deserves five minutes of consideration from the man who put him on death row," Amy said bluntly.

"I _arrested_ Howard Epps, OK?" Booth interjected; he could just about tolerate being reminded of his victims as a sniper, but he wasn't interested in people trying to guilt him about something he'd only played an indirect part in. "It was the jury who sentenced him to die."

"They found a pubic hair on the victim at the crime scene," Amy continued (Booth couldn't believe that kind of thing could actually form the basis for _any_ kind of argument, but this was the world he lived in these days). "It didn't belong to my client. They never figured out whose it was."

"Blame it on the judge who disallowed it as evidence and the judge who disallowed it on appeal," Booth clarified; Gunn might have used that kind of legal argument to get some clients off during their time in charge of Wolfram & Hart, but as far as he was concerned you shouldn't escape justice just because of some legal loophole- like that time Gunn got their client off because the judge had dodgy investments- that gave you the right to get away with something you'd have been executed for under other circumstances.

"Epps was not well-represented at either trial," Amy said simply.

"How long have you been on the case?" Booth asked briefly.

"Almost a week," Amy replied, showing no sign that she was curious about the reason for this change of tactic.

"Less than a week, huh?" Booth replied, unable to stop himself from laughing slightly as he walked around from behind his desk. "Two judges, two juries, two prosecutors they find Epps guilty yet it's _me_ you come after."

"I'm asking..." Amy said, looking back at her, "are you absolutely positive Howard Epps killed that girl?"

"Yeah," Booth replied automatically. "I am absolutely positive."

"You know in your heart the judges should have allowed the juries to hear that, that victim was _with_ another man that night," Amy continued, staring intently at him. "You know it."

"Epps _still_ would have been convicted," Booth said simply; the fact that the victim had slept with someone earlier just made Epps's murder of her all the more brutal, given that he may have been following her to wait for the right moment to go after her rather than simply selecting a victim at random.

"Not if I had been his lawyer," Amy replied with a brief satisfied smile.

"You weren't," Booth countered simply.

"I am now," Amy retorted, her gaze still fixed on Booth as she spoke. "When was the last time you looked him in the face? 'Cause you're a lot smarter then you were seven years ago, a lot less angry. You might want to check out the evidence again."

With that, she threw a folder down onto Booth's desk and walked out of the office, leaving Booth to pick up the folder and stare at its contents, including a photograph of Howard Epps.

That was the annoying thing about people like Amy, really; they were so certain that they were right that they made you question your own certainties about these things...

Still...

Now that she'd brought it up, with Epps's execution date coming up, he supposed that he might as well check it out...

* * *

  
Sitting on the other side of the glass partition as Epps sat down opposite him, a slightly haunted expression on his face that Faith had never demonstrated during all his previous visits to a prison, Booth wished that he could get his mind off the young woman he'd come to consider one of the closest things he'd had to a sister since Kathy (Even if Fred had fallen more easily into that role due to his more regular contact with her); unlike Faith, Epps hadn't _volunteered_ to go to jail.

"I'd ask how you were doing, Howard," Booth said as they both picked up the 'phones' to speak to the person on the other side, "but I guess we both know the answer."

" _Agent Booth_ ," Epps replied from the other side. " _Did you come to apologize_?"

"I'm not the one who beat a seventeen-year-old girl to death," Booth stated simply; even as Angelus he'd never been as brutal as Epps (Although that was mainly because he had less direct methods of doing things that lasted longer rather than because he was a better person; the worst human serial killer ever produced couldn't match Angelus's patience). "Your attorney wants me to look you in the face."

" _Why_?" Epps asked simply.

"She thinks you're innocent," Booth replied, avoiding expressing his own opinion on the topic.

" _Well, she's right about that_ ," Epps said with a brief, urgent nod. " _I didn't kill anyone, unlike you, a sniper_."

For a moment Booth felt like punching the glass- that kind of statement always made him feel sick; he might not be _proud_ of the people he'd killed as a sniper, but they'd goddamn _deserved_ it, unlike his victims as Angelus-, but then Epps continued speaking and he forced his mind back on track.

" _...got murdered was smart, she was pretty, she's from a good family_ ," Epps was saying. " _Someone has to die for that... and I'm all they've got_."

"OK," Booth said simply- if the man was only going to start essentially accusing him of arresting him just so a bunch of rich 'snobs' had someone to blame for their daughter's death, he wasn't going to sit here and listen to him-, "I looked you in the face."

" _I've read it can be hell_!" Epps yelled as Booth began to put the phone back on its hook, prompting the former resident of that dimension to remain where he was.

" _They say it's like going to sleep, but you're on fire and you're paralyzed so you can't scream_ ," Epps said, his fear and apprehension at the thought of such a fate clear on his face. " _I mean... that's all you got sometimes, you know... a scream_?"

Booth knew that only too well; sometimes, when he'd been in Hell, all he'd been able to _do_ to release the pain was to scream...

He still thought that Epps was the murderer.

But if there was even a _chance_ that April Wright had been murdered by someone else- if there was _any_ evidence that suggested someone else was involved-, he had to check it out.

* * *

  
Standing in the basic questioning room- at least it didn't have a desk; Booth never felt comfortable being interrogated while he was sitting down-, Booth wasn't surprised when Cullen entered the room himself; with something as big as the Epps case, it was only natural for Cullen to get involved.

"You want to start or shall I?" Cullen asked briskly as soon as the door had closed behind him.

"I'm sorry, sir-" Booth began, trying not to show his discomfort at Cullen's glare (Even after all this time, he still wasn't used to being answerable to another about his actions; back in Sunnydale he'd been more loosely affiliated with the Scoobies rather than being part of the 'command structure', and even when Wesley had been in charge of Angel Investigations he'd been allowed a certain amount of leeway after that whole mess with Harmony and the vampire pyramid scheme had been dealt with).

"I'll start," Cullen said, turning to face Booth with his hands on his hips, cutting Booth's answer off before he could finish it. "I'm thinking of, uh, suspending you for freelancing on a death penalty case we cleared seven years ago."

"My intention was just to tie up a few loose ends," Booth replied.

"Do you disapprove of the death penalty on principle, Agent Booth?" Cullen asked, folding his arms to glare at the other agent.

"No sir," Booth replied automatically (After all the demons and humans he'd killed in his lifetime, disapproving of the death penalty for any reason seemed stupid). "I have no problem with the death penalty."

"Because I hear that you are working for a particularly attractive young idealistic -" Cullen began.

"Not true, sir," Booth interrupted (His life was complicated enough without adding in a non-existent relationship with Amy to it). "I mean, yes, she's young, and she's an idealist, but I'm _not_ working for her, no; like I said, there was a loose end, and I arrested Howard Epps; I provided the evidence which lead to the death sentence."

"Well, that's your job-" Cullen began.

"I need to be _sure_ ," Booth interjected- it might not be the best strategy to interrupt his boss, but what he'd had to say had to be said-, pausing for a moment to give Culllen a chance to respond before he continued.

"This guy was her godfather," he continued, reflecting back on Ross's reaction when presented with their latest evidence. "I believe he had sex with a seventeen year old girl the same night she was murdered- a fact that the jury never heard, by the way. He's married, he's partners in a law firm; the guys got everything to lose."

"If you want to question him, fine," Cullen said, pausing for a moment as he walked closer to the former vampire. "Is that the extent of your involvement, Agent Booth?"

"Not exactly," Booth replied (God, he _really_ missed the old days; demons might be tougher, but at least you could just kill them most of the time). "They're moving to exhume the victim's body, sir."

"On whose recommendation?" Cullen asked pointedly.

"The young idealistic lawyer and Doctor Brennan," Booth replied; if he was going to commit himself to this, he might as well go all the way."

"You got the squints involved," Cullen said simply, staring silently at Booth before he reached over to pat him on the shoulder. "Well, if she shoots anybody this time, I sure the hell hope it's you."

As Cullen walked out of the room, Booth was unable to stop a brief pang of nostalgia for the days when getting shot was only a minor inconvenience to him...

* * *

  
Even as they began to search the part of the marsh that Hodgins had isolated in his analysis of the dirt in the wound on Amy's skull, Booth still wasn't sure how he felt about this current mess; the evidence might be looking favourably at the idea that April Wright had been killed by David Ross and the murder weapon here, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that there was something here they were missing, particularly regarding what Epps had been doing in the area in the first place...

"Over here; there's something else ere!" he called, his mind brought back on track at the sound of another agent informing the group of searching agents that the tyre iron had been discovered, studying the screen of the device before him (He wasn't entirely clear on what it did- his technical knowledge was still relatively limited-, but it was something to do with using sonar to 'scan' the ground).

"I got something," he confirmed as Bones hurried over to join him in studying the screen of the device before them. "More than a tyre iron."

After a moment's silence as Bones studied the screen, Booth decided that it was time to ask the most obvious question of the hour.

"Is that what I think it is?" he asked, hoping against hope that it wasn't; things were already frustrating enough in this case...

"I need a shov-!" Bones began to yell.

"Bones," Booth said, holding up a hand to stop her before he raised his voice. "I need a shovel; she's digging here!"

"Right away, sir!" a female agent said, another agent hurrying over with the requested instrument as the 'sonar' thing was pushed away, Booth turning down the offered shovel as Bones began to dig, only for the forensic anthropologist to pause what she was doing and turn to look pointedly at him.

"Well, are you going to help?" she asked critically

"Well, I would," Booth replied, already feeling awkward about his reasons for doing nothing, "but this is a twelve hundred dollar suit..."

"Are you _kidding_ me?" Bones asked, standing up to glare at him. "I haven't slept in forty-eight hours and you're worried about your suit?"

When she phrased it like that, Booth really _did_ feel like a jackass; he supposed he was just experiencing a bit of a throwback to the days when he tried to keep himself relatively presentable on a limited budget during some of his better days after his soul was restored but before he met Buffy...

"Dig gently," Bones told him as he began to impatiently shovel his way through the ground in front of him. "Small layers at a time."

The digging had only been going on for a few moments when Bones spoke again, the chosen topic of conversation being something that Booth almost couldn't believe.

"What would you usually be doing?" she asked.

"What?" Booth said, looking at her while trying to establish if his hearing had started to fail him; what did this have to do with _anything_?

"If it were a normal weekend," Bones clarified.

"You want to discuss this now?" Booth asked, trying to conceal the scale of the discomfort the question inspired; even after all this time human, a part of him still had trouble adjusting to the idea that there _was_ such a thing as a 'weekend' where he could change his routine from what it was the rest of the week.

"Compared to you, with your multiple sex partners-" Bones began.

"You know, that's none of your business, OK?" Booth cut in; even if it was unintentional, the mental images evoked by her comment reminded him uncomfortably of his old attitude towards relationships as Angelus, back when he'd freely seduced multiple women- sometimes at the same time- for the sole purpose of killing them later.

"I'm not having sex with Amy," he stated, even as he continued to dig, "and I have never _ever_ cheated on any woman that I have _ever_ been with, _never_."

It was a slight lie, of course, but it wasn't like he could be blamed for what _Angelus_ had done in his time; the demon's attitude towards relationships _had_ been very relaxed...

"I just asked what you'd normally be doing," Bones replied briefly as she continued digging.

"I'd be at a movie, dancing, maybe with somebody that I care about," Booth replied, digging the shovel back into the ground as he continued to clear the ground below him. "You?"

The silence from Bones at that last query prompted him to look up in her direction, just as she lifted up a dirt-covered skull with a slightly stunned expression on her face as she showed it to Booth.

 _What the_...? Booth muttered, his focus returning to his own digging, as the removal of the subsequent shovelfuls of earth revealed another skull, this one clearly accompanied by other bones.

"OK," Booth said, his tone low as he took in the sight before him. "What the hell is going on here...?"

He was rapidly coming to the conclusion that they'd just been played in a manner that even _Angelus_ would have admired if he'd been human...

* * *

  
Staring at Epps as he was escorted into the interrogation room in the prison, Amy and Bones sitting in front of him while Booth stood behind them, the former vampire felt like being physically sick at the expression on Epps's face; the bastard actually looked like he was about to _cry_...

"Thank you," Epps said (The worst part was that the bastard could almost sound convincing if you hadn't seen the corpses he'd left buried in the marsh). "All I can say is... thank you."

"What's that, Howie?" Booth interjected; the last thing he wanted was this guy getting the chance to practise sounding sympathetic. "Practising to get jury sympathy?"

"I did not kill anyone," Epps said, turning to look at Bones with a slight smile. "Thank you... I mean it."

"We found the tyre iron," Booth said grimly, refusing to allow Epps the satisfaction of provoking him. "You _will_ be found guilty of these murders."

"Well, I need a good lawyer," Epps replied, looking at Amy with an expression that seemed to become more self-satisfied the more he spoke. "These murder investigations take a long time, then there's the appeals since I should have been dead a half an hour ago. It's all gravy from now on."

"We gave him everything he wanted..." Amy said, the horror in her voice matching the growing disgust Booth felt for the man before him; he might have been evil as Angelus, but the idea that someone could be this twisted _with_ a soul...

Booth barely even registered Epps mockingly taunting Amy about the possibility that the death penalty would be suspended by the time he went to trial for the latest murders- although the fact that Epps's words sent Amy running from the room in tears at least suggested that Epps _might_ have more trouble finding a lawyer willing to take his case with this kind of evidence-, only turning his mind back to the current conversation when Epps turned his attention to Bones.

"And I owe you too," he said, nodding at her in a sickeningly eager manner that put Booth briefly in mind of Spike during his 'puppy-dog' phase (The stages of Spike's life when he would do literally _anything_ if it meant making Drusilla or his current lover happy). "I read your book, and when I heard you were working with Booth here I knew you were just what I needed."

Before Booth could break Epps's nose in response to that comment- Temperance Brennan wasn't a _tool_ , she was a _person_ -, Bones had stood up, Epps's hand in hers- he'd grabbed her hand while he was talking- and yanked him forward across the table, slamming his face and wrist into it with such force that Booth was fairly sure he heard something crack.

"Are you going to arrest me for assault?" Bones asked as she glanced back at him.

"From what I saw?" Booth said with a brief shrug as they turned to walk away, leaving the guards to deal with the now-injured Epps. "Purely self-defence."

* * *

  
As he sat grimly in Wong Fu's an hour or so later, Bones off to his left as they sat at the bar, Booth wished he still had his vampiric stamina; he might not exactly be _useless_ at hunting vampires in his current state if he was careful- he'd certainly proven his abilities to himself and everyone as a human during his time in Hell-, but right now he was far too tired, physically and mentally, to even _think_ about going out to try to find a vampire nest to vent his frustrations on...

"What's the matter with you two?" Sid asked, walking up to them.

"Bad day at work," Booth said by way of response, sipping briefly at his drink as he spoke.

"Well, that's what you get for working on weekends," Sid said with a brief smile. "You hear about uh, taking some time off, having a little fun?"

"Why?" Bones asked, evidently grateful for the potential for an alternative topic of conversation. "What did you do?"

"I'd be breaking about six different laws if I just _told_ you how I maneuvered on my Saturday nights," Sid said, sipping at his own drink before he looked back at them. "But I will bring you some food.

"I'm not hungry," Bones began.

"No use arguing with Sid, Bones," Booth said, briefly bumping knuckles with the restaurant owner as he walked off.

"Are you in trouble with your boss?" Bones asked.

"Oh, you know…" Booth said, trying to sound nonchalant before he finally voiced the main issue that was currently bothering him. "I'm sorry for wrecking your weekend for nothing."

"No," Bones replied simply. "Not for nothing."

"Ah, you know what I mean…" Booth muttered, looking down at the bar in frustration and shame. "You know, all that running around… it didn't change anything. Epps was guilty; he was always guilty."

"There was doubt," Bones responded. "We had an obligation to respect that doubt. We all share in the death of every human being."

"Very poetic…" Booth reflected as he took another sip of his drink.

"No, very literal," Bones clarified. "We all share DNA. When I look at a bone it's not some artifact that I can separate from myself; it's a part of a person who got here the same way I did. It should never be easy to take someone's life; I don't care who it is."

For a moment, Booth could only stare at her after that statement, unable to believe that the scientific, rational Temperance Brennan could have made a statement that… _passionate_ … about the value of human life.

Even after some of the reports he'd heard about her sorting through mass graves, the victims were still _people_ to her; they weren't _statistics_ …

He'd once thought of Bones as the personification of the new life he had lived since he stopped calling himself Angel- a world of science and rationality, where men and women did bad things because they were men and women and he could use his skills as a human to put them away-, but looking at her now, with that speech still ringing in his ears…

She truly _was_ the perfect antithesis to Angelus.

"What?" Bones asked, looking at him in confusion as he continued to stare. "What?"

"You know," Booth said, smiling at her as he held his fingers up just a short distance apart, "you've been practicing your Nobel prize speech just a little too much."

"Here you go," a waitress said, breaking off the brief bonding moment as she and Sid set the dishes down in front of them.

"Scallops and sachewan garlic sauce, duck fried rice, apple pie, hot cup of joe," Sid said by way of explanation as he picked up a glass. "To simple pleasures, my friends."

 _You're right about that_ , Booth thought, as he and Bones began to dish into their food.

They might have spent the weekend giving a guy who _really_ deserved to die an extra lease on life, but right now, as he sat eating Chinese food with a forensic anthropologist who knew next to nothing about _either_ of his pasts- human or vampire-, Booth wasn't sure he'd ever been more content with himself than he was now.


	9. The Girl in the Fridge

"I didn't give Maggie Schilling those samples, she boosted them herself," Mary Costello said as she and her husband walked around their living room to sit down as the conversation continued, her tone a frustratingly casual manner that put Booth in mind of Darla after they'd left a massacre in a house on a busy street; she _knew_ that she'd just murdered innocent people, but she was so casually confident that she'd get away with it that what they'd done didn't even seem to register to anyone around them. "Barragan just blamed me so he would have an excuse to fire me."

"Why'd he fire you?" Booth asked; he had some suspicions about how the other woman would respond, but he wanted to confirm it before he allowed himself to speculate further.

"Because he's a horn dog," Mary replied dismissively, smiling briefly at her husband- her stance and expression putting Booth briefly in mind of Faith back in her first year in Sunnydale- before she sat down. "I tried to keep things... professional... you know what I mean?"

"Doctor Barragan said that you were closer to Maggie Schilling than any other patient," Bones put in at that point (And _God_ , Booth wished he could stop the brief flash he got of Bones renewing her 'close' relationship with her professor; he had no _reason_ to be thinking like that).

"Did you meet her parents?" Mary asked.

"Yes," Bones replied uncertainly.

"Then you know the poor girl was pretty much on her own," Mary replied, Booth leaving Brennan to handle the questions while he took the opportunity to examine the surrounding apartment in greater detail. "We took her in."

"He said that you went out together, that you took her to clubs," Bones continued.

"We just... felt sorry for her, you know?" Mary's husband Scott added as Booth ran his finger along the kitchen counter, briefly wondering at Scott's distinctive accent before he continued his search. "She was lonely, so we showed her a good time, right?"

As his gaze fell on the refrigerator in the kitchen- a shining silver model where everything else around him seemed to be about as old as the stuff he'd kept in the small kitchen he'd kept in his apartment back in Sunnydale in the event that Buffy came over and wanted breakfast (Just because he hadn't pushed her didn't mean he hadn't _thought_ about it)-, Booth tuned out the Costello's words as he studied the object in front of him, his attention

Taking a quick glance to ensure that they weren't looking at him, he leaned one shoulder against the refrigerator and pushed slightly against it, a grim smile spreading across his face as he took in what his actions had exposed; a rust-brown circular indenture on the floor, in what looked like the exact same shape as the legs of the fridge they'd found Maggie in.

 _Jackpot_ , he reflected grimly as he took in what he'd just uncovered.

He had to admit, this case was _definitely_ going in his record books; this had to be the shortest amount of time it had _ever_ taken them to identify the killers (The evidence might be argued to be circumstantial, but in his book you didn't throw out a fridge that turned up with a dead body in it unless you _knew_ what was in there).

"... Maggie to go to meetings," Scott was saying as Book turned around to walk back into the living room area of the apartment. "You know, AA..."

"That's very kind of you," Booth said, keeping his tone level as he looked between them. "Let's talk about your new refrigerator."

"Why?" Mary asked, looking at him with a slight chuckle of confusion.

"Mainly," Booth replied as he stared back at her, "I would like to know what happened to your old one, huh?"

It was the subsequent arrogant smirk she shot at him that reminded him of Darla more than anything right then; his sire had possessed that exact same expression whenever someone had attempted to confront them about what they'd just done when Darla was secure in her knowledge that they couldn't do anything to prove it.

Whether it was because of what they'd done to Maggie, the fact that she and her husband had kept it quiet for a year without ever reporting it, or simply the fact that she reminded him of the Faith he'd once thought existed before that final fight in an alleyway, Booth was definitely going to take _serious_ pleasure in wiping that smirk from her face...

* * *

  
"Well," Booth said, walking over to Brennan an hour later as FBI crime scene techs swarmed through the Costello's apartment, having just finished a brief conversation with one of the techs, "the fridge we found Maggie in is a match with the marks on the Costello's floor."

"They're sadomasochist fetishists," Bones said, her tone suggesting a slight incredulity.

"Yeah," Booth said, picking up a box and moving it to the nearby table for them to better examine its contents. "They turned the basement into a fun room."

"Seeking sexual gratification through the manipulation of power," Bones reflected, as she picked up some kind of spiked collar and held it on the end of her finger. "Probably the oldest of fetishes; master-slave... it's all about dominance."

"Well," Booth muttered reflectively, "this sort of thing only comes up when the bloom goes off the rose, if you know what I mean."

"I don't know what you mean," Bones replied, the same confused expression on her face that Booth had come to find highly amusing over the last few months.

"You know," Booth said, keeping his voice low as he shrugged. "When the regular stuff... when it gets old, you need to spice it up or it's over. The sex is _good_ , you don't need any help."

"Well, that's for sure," Bones said, smiling slightly at his comment.

"I'm sorry?" Booth said, looking at his partner in surprise; he couldn't even _remember_ the last time he'd heard Bones say something like that to him without it being preceded by an elaborate debate of some kind...

"I was agreeing," Bones replied.

"Yeah, well... don't, OK?" Booth asked, trying to stop his mind asking the question of who Bones had been thinking off to prompt that last smile. "It kind of freaks me out."

"I was just saying that I, myself, feel no inclination towards either pain or dominance when it comes to sex," Bones replied

"Are you sure?" Booth replied, seizing on the opportunity to lighten the mood (He'd always enjoyed this freedom when it came to Booth's personality; without needing to worry about the restrictions on his soul, he could be a lot more relaxed than he'd been in the old days).

"Yeah, I'm sure," Bones replied.

"Because you can be very bossy," Booth responded, ignoring the slight tap of a crop on his shoulder as he turned to pick a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs- why did people _make_ these stupid things?- with a pen before turning to look at the Costellos as they were escorted out of the apartment.

"Look at him, huh?" he said, waving the handcuffs mocking at Scott Costello (He wished the guy would react; these two were being _far_ too calm when there was this kind of evidence that they'd been involved in a murder. "Look at him, all smiley; I bet he just _loves_ these things..."

Further mocking was cut off as Bones reached over to remove the handcuffs from the pen to look at them more closely.

"These could explain the stress fractures," she said, as she opened one of the cuffs. "Her bones were brittle from the disease; struggling would... cause the cracks we saw."

If he'd still been Angel, Booth was certain he would have punched the nearest Costello for doing something like that to an essentially teenage girl; as it was, he couldn't do anything like that without having them scream 'police brutality' at him, so he'd just have to leave it and trust the system to put them away.

BDSM...

God, he'd just _never_ managed to get the appeal after he'd regained his soul; Angelus might have enjoyed the thrill of dominating another being, but after spending so long with his body under the control of his demon, Angel had _never_ felt comfortable even _thinking_ about doing it again even in his fantasies about Buffy prior to him losing his soul, and the memories he'd been given of Booth's upbringing didn't exactly inspire much interest in that scene either.

Add in what Bones's analysis of the fractures on Maggie's wrists had turned up, and he _really_ didn't like these people; Maggie might have been a drug addict, but nobody deserved to die like that even before you took that brittle bone thing she was suffering from into account...

He was _definitely_ going to feel a certain satisfaction when this case went to trial.

* * *

  
Booth hated to admit it even to himself, but he'd have been lying if he didn't admit that he'd enjoyed the idea of Bones having to go up against her old forensics professor when they learned that he'd been appointed expert witness for the prosecution; the fact that the guy seemed to think that he could just walk into Bones's life like he'd never left and have them pick up an apparently sexual relationship _exactly_ where they left off had _really_ gotten on his nerves...

It was unfortunate that the feeling of satisfaction only lasted until the moment when Bones had to take the stand and explained her findings to the jury- that was the annoying bit about this case compared to their others; this was the first time that they'd actually _depended_ on the analysis to make their points when it could legitimately be challenged, given the lack of fixed forensic identification such as teeth marks or that bruised bone-, and he'd known they were in trouble.

Bones might like to consider herself a fair speaker when dealing with her students, and could make a half-decent argument for her choice of words by claiming that she was trying not to treat the jury like idiots, but she'd been using so many long words that he'd felt like he was dealing with Willow or Fred when they were on a roll with their current theory and didn't really register who was listening all over again.

As much as he hated to admit it, Bones's problem right now was that she went over the jurors' heads; it looked like she was trying to blind them with science to make them agree with her out of uncertainty about her facts.

This 'Stires' guy, on the other hand...

"In my opinion," Stires said as he sat in the stand, looking out at the trial's audience with a casual manner that reminded Booth of Lindsey, "the high levels of hydromorphone are more consistent with recreational use than for pain relief."

"Could you explain?" the defence lawyer asked.

"Well," Stires replied, smiling in a manner that Booth didn't like, "I might not use all the technical language but I'll try to make myself understood."

"Objection, your honour," the prosecution lawyer- Levitt, Booth thought his name was; he hadn't had the chance to talk to the guy on his own yet- said, standing up as the jury smiled at Stires's comment. "The witness is impugning another witness."

"Sustained," the judge said, before indicating Stires with her pen. "Continue."

"I'm sorry; I, uh, I don't do this professionally," Stires said, the apparently genuine apology in his voice at that last comment just increasing Booth's distaste for him as he turned back to address the jury. "People who need to relieve physical pain will stop after the pain disappears. It doesn't take more then an average dose to accomplish that. Drug users are trying to bury _emotional_ pain which means they'll medicate until they feel nothing. This is why they have a tendency to overdose, like Maggie Schilling.

"That's not accurate," Bones whispered to Levitt, leaning forward to address the lawyer. "Sometimes chronic pain does not respond to medication."

"I'll bring it up on cross-examination," Levitt said, Booth reaching over to take hold of Brennan's shoulder and pull her back into her seat.

"What about Dr. Brennan's claim that her pain was somehow connected to the victim being bound for a length of time?" the defence lawyer added.

"Well," Stires continued, "the Costellos have already stipulated to the fact that they bound Miss. Schilling as a part of their rather unorthodox sexual act, and Dr. Brennan agrees that Miss. Schilling had hyperpara…"

He paused briefly before continuing. "Well, if I could simplify, a thyroid condition that can weaken her bones. No need to look for… _bondage_ scenarios.

"That is ridiculous," Brennan whispered to Booth. "He's ignoring all the facts…"

Booth briefly thought about responding in confirmation- he himself had pointed out that binding the legs was hardly indicative of an interest in a sexual act, and the fact that the Costellos had just dumped the body after things had gone wrong did _very_ little to endear them to him- but then Stires continued and Booth had a new issue to focus on.

"With respect to my former student, Doctor Brennan," Stires added, "with findings like these I don't know why she became a Forensic Anthropologist; she seems to have ignored all but her pre-conceived notions about the case."

"Objection," Levitt said, voicing Booth's own impulsive desire to speak before he gave into temptation and found himself in contempt of court; as it was, with Levitt the one voicing it they could at least give the impression of remaining professional in this case (Although Booth still would have preferred Stires to actually meet with some _consequences_ for his last comment).

"Do you disagree with Dr. Brennan's data?" the defence lawyer asked.

"Well, sometimes doctors can use data to confuse a very simple situation," Stires replied with a shrug. "I mean, I'm a doctor and I could hardly follow her."

Booth was ready to hit the guy even then; what he said afterwards- while _smiling_ at the goddamn _jury_ \- just made him want to do more than just punch him.

"This case is about people, not incomprehensible technical jargon," Stires continued (Booth couldn't believe the guy could use that argument; did he even _care_ that the 'people' he was defending had _killed_ somebody?) "I don't think that these people should be convicted of murder just because Dr. Brennan sounds smart."

Booth didn't even register Levitt's objection; looking at Stires in that moment, all he could hear were sentences that he'd only ever heard in his memories, even if they'd been spoken with his voice and come from his own lips.

" _You got a lot to learn about men, kiddo. Although I guess you proved that last night_."

" _Which do you think is worse, Wes? Stealing my kid like you did, or banging him, like Cordelia_?"

" _Darla felt the same way. It made her sick, you squirming inside her. So, she jammed a stake in her own heart, just so she wouldn't have to hear your first whiny breath_."

Stires was using his personal knowledge of Bones's personal defects to undermine and belittle her in court, simply to defend people whom he _knew_ were guilty from the evidence she'd provided, for nothing more than a fee…

It was almost worse than the times Angelus had belittled and hurt his friends and family back when he'd been released; at least then he'd had the excuse that Angelus wasn't really _him_ …

"…court with adjourn until 9 a.m. tomorrow," the judge said, drawing Booth's attention back to the present as the jury were led out of the room.

"Listen," he said, leaning over to whisper to Bones before they stood up, "don't worry about a thing, OK?"

He knew that Bones wasn't as cold as Stires was essentially trying to make the jury believe she was; the trick was to figure out the right way to make her _reveal_ that side of herself to the jury…

* * *

  
"He wasn't acting as an objective expert; he was making up a story!" Bones protested once they were out in the hallway with Levitt and Deaver.

"The judge chastised him in front of the jury," Levitt put in. "That will work for us…"

"The _hell_ it will," Deaver said in frustration, her arms folded as she glared at them. "The jury _loves_ Stires. He looks like a regular guy who's not allowed to speak the truth because the stupid rules get in the way."

"The rules of jurist prudence aren't stupid," Bones retorted incredulously (Booth made a mental note to talk with her about when it was a good idea _not_ to talk; showing support for the rules that were screwing them over at this point wasn't going to help).

"Doctor Brennan," Deaver continued, her glare now focused on Bones, "you need to learn the difference between reality and perception. A trial is all about perception."

"Wow, you're the reason civilization is declining," Bones countered (A part of Booth couldn't help but be impressed; even her _insults_ were more developed than normal people's).

"Talk to her," Deaver practically begged him.

"I kind of agree with her," Booth replied briefly.

Staring at them both in frustration for a moment, Deaver turned around and walked away down the corridor, evidently annoyed at their lack of progress in the case.

"Thanks," Bones whispered to him.

"You know, I really don't agree with you," Booth said (It wasn't technically accurate, but explaining that he agreed with her views while disagreeing with her approach wouldn't help Bones change her approach in the time they needed), shaking his head slightly. "I just… I don't like her."

To Bones's credit, she didn't allow the last comment to affect her, simply staring at him for a moment before she turned around to address Levitt once again.

"Put me back on the stand," she said, her arms folded resolutely. "I can rebut everything that Michael said.

"She can do this," Booth put in, hoping this show of support would be enough to make up for his last comment.

"I'll think about it," Levitt said, his tone of voice giving the impression that he was more inclined to do the opposite, before he turned around and walked off down the corridor after Deaver.

"I've never been in this position before, Booth," Bones said, looking at him with an intense urgency. "I _need_ to get back up there."

"Alright," Booth said, nodding briefly at her. "Just… let me talk to him."

He just hoped that what he had in mind would work; if this line of questioning didn't pay off, he'd be in trouble on a professional _and_ personal level for wasting the court's time…

* * *

  
As he sat in the courtroom, staring at Bones as she sat in the witness stand, once again recounting the facts in an excessive amount of scientific detail despite Levitt's best efforts to subtly encourage down to a more 'pedestrian' terminology, Booth wasn't sure what he was more nervous about; the possibility that his idea to get jury sympathy back on their side and away from Professor 'Stirgelus' wouldn't work, or how Bones would react to it if it did.

Using the weaknesses of others to get the reaction he wanted…

He'd never been comfortable doing this kind of thing as _Angel_ \- even when he'd been planning to infiltrate the Circle of the Black Thorn he'd only been lying about _himself_ rather than trying to hurt others (Using Fred's memory to get what he was after didn't count; the rest of the team hadn't known he was using her like that and they'd learned his real reasons shortly afterwards anyway)-; he had to wonder if the fact that he was willing to do it as Booth was something that he should be worried about…

"Doctor Brennan, why'd you become a Forensic Anthropologist?" Levitt asked

"I beg your pardon?" Bones asked in confusion.

"There must be some reason you chose this field out of the hundred of other careers someone of your intelligence could have chosen," Levitt elaborated. "Was there some… emotional reason, perhaps?"

"Objection," the defence lawyer said. "Relevance, you honor?"

"I don't see how this pertains to the case-" Bones began, evidently uncomfortable at the new topic.

"Doctor Brennan is cold, distant, and alienating, your honour," Levitt said by way of explanation even as he continued to look at Bones.

"Hey!" Bones yelled.

"I need the jury to understand why she's so cold," Levitt continued, turning to address the judge, "so that they might be willing to accept her testimony."

"Her personality issues are not relevant to this case-" the defence lawyer interjected.

"They opened up this line of questioning, your honor," Levitt continued (Booth was glad to know that he was accurate in that detail; legal issues like that had never been his strong point, but he'd evidently picked up more from Gunn than he'd thought at the time), indicating the defence team. "When Doctor Stires was on the stand, he wondered why Doctor Brennan became a forensic anthropologist, so the defense must have thought it had some relevance then."

"Sorry, Mr. Meredith," the judge said, looking at him with a slight smile in her eyes, "you _did_ raise the issue. Overruled; you may continue, Mr. Levitt."

"Doctor Brennan," Levitt said, his attention once again focused on Bones, "your parents disappeared when you were fifteen and no one's ever found out whatever happened to them. Is that correct?

Booth momentarily wished that he'd never brought this line of inquiry up when Bones glared at him, but forced himself to simply sit there and not register it; any sign of discomfort at this point could jeopardize their already-fragile defence…

"Please answer the question, Doctor Brennan," the judge gently prompted.

"That's correct," Bones said after a momentary further pause.

"It must be very painful," Levitt continued. "Is it fair to say that you've been trying to solve the mystery of their loss your whole life?"

"Do I want answers?" Bones replied. "Yes. As to how that is affecting my behavior- which I assume is what you are trolling for-, I don't put much stock in Psychology."

"Is that why you wrap yourself up in techno-speak?" Levitt continued, walking away from the stand to address his question to the jury. "So you don't have to feel how these victims remind you of your parents?"

"How I feel doesn't matter," Bones countered. "My job doesn't depend on it-"

"But it's informed by it," Levitt neatly retaliated. "Are you as cold and unfeeling as you seem?"

For a moment silence dominated the courtroom as Levitt stared at Bones, the beautiful anthropologist unable to do more than look back at him as her own inner conflict waged inside her, until she finally spoke.

"I see a face on every skull," she said, a slight tremor of her lip the only sign of just how distressed she was by what had just been brought out in public. "I can look at their bones and tell you how they walked, where they hurt. Maggie Schilling is real to me."

Booth briefly noted that Bones had turned her head slightly so that she was now addressing Stires, but put that factor aside to focus more on his partner's words themselves (Just so long as Stires understood what an _asshole_ he'd been, how the guy was reacting to this didn't matter to Booth as much as seeing how Bones was coping with it).

"The pain she suffered was real," Bones continued, her statement drawing increased attention from the jury as she spoke. "Her hip was being eaten away by infection from lying on her side. Sure, like Doctor Stires said, the _disease_ could contribute to that if you take it out of context, but you can't break Maggie Schilling down into little pieces. She was a whole person who fought to free herself. Her wrists were broken from struggling against the handcuffs. The bones in her ankles were ground together because her feet were tied, and her side, her hip, and her shoulder were being eaten away by infection, and the more she struggled, the more pain she was in so they gave her those drugs to keep her quiet. They gave her so much it killed her."

As Bones turned to address the jury directly, Booth was almost tempted to give her a brief smile of approval if it wasn't for the risk of it being taken the wrong way; the last thing he wanted was for her to think he was amused at the idea of her in emotional pain like this.

"These facts can't be ignored or dismissed because you think I'm… boring or obnoxious because I don't matter," Bones said, the emotion on her face at the current topic obvious to everyone. "What I feel doesn't matter. Only she matters… only Maggie."

 _Jackpot_ , Booth thought to himself.

After a plea like that, based on emotion rather than casual jokes, you'd need to be made of stone to want to let the Costellos off.

The only problem was how he'd patch things up with Bones after what he'd just done…

* * *

  
As far as scenes for apologies went, Booth wondered what it said about his relationship with Bones where he was attempting to apologise to her while standing on scaffolding around the half-way point of the Washington monument; why was it that he could never choose- or manage- a good location for the _really_ difficult conversations with the women in his life?

Still, the fact that she was here in the first place at least leant weight to the hope that she'd be willing to listen to his apology; Stires had clearly burnt every last one of his bridges with her, given that the last news he'd heard about the guy had Stires heading back to his old university after recent events had affected his reputation when applying for the position here…

"The victim is an adult male, thirty-five to forty years old," Bones said as she studied the burned body tied to the scaffolding before them. "From the pattern of the burning, I would say an accelerant was used; could you hand me my bag?

"Yeah, sure," Booth said, picking up the bag in question and handing it over to her. "Hey, listen; you want my coat or something? It's cold up here."

"If I did, I'd ask for it," Bones retorted, neatly cutting off that potential line of apology.

"Yeah, sorry…" Booth said

Then again, it was probably for the best; Bones wasn't really someone who appreciated- or sometimes even understood- subtlety…

"And… um… I'm sorry," he said again, hoping that she understood where the second 'sorry' was coming from.

It was an inadequate means of apologizing for the way he'd used her past without her permission in the manner that he had, but he didn't have anything else that he could say to make his point; putting away the Costellos didn't change how he'd hurt her…

After a moment's silence as Bones contemplated what she'd just heard, she

"You had something to accomplish, and you found a logical way of getting what you needed," she said, shrugging briefly at him before she allowed him a brief nod. "I probably would have done the same thing."

Booth couldn't help but smile slightly at that.

The fact that she understood why he'd done it didn't make up for hurting her like that, but at least she was willing to move on from the incident…


	10. The Man in the Fallout Shelter

"What have you got there?" Booth asked as he walked into the Jeffersonian, Bones still standing over the body he'd brought in from the fallout shelter earlier, going through the pockets of the coat that the body had been wearing.

"Two open tickets to Paris, one way, Pan Transit airlines," Bones replied, squinting slightly as she studied the tickets held up in front of her, most likely having trouble with the faded ink. "They're blank."

"Pan Transit went out of business in the sixties," Booth noted (One advantage of being a vampire was the history he'd experienced; even when he'd been in his 'alley phase' after that doughnut shop incident, he'd spent a fair amount of time reading newspapers out of a lack of anything else to do).

"I thought that you were at the party?" Bones added, looking briefly up at him.

"Oh, that wasn't a party," Booth said, shaking his head at the memory (He hadn't been surrounded by that many geeks since the last time he was in the Wolfram & Hart science department, and that had been _long_ before his final assault on the Circle given that he'd cut most of his ties to the department after Fred's 'death'). "That was a Star Wars convention."

Apparently not paying attention to his comment, Bones reached out with her tweezers to pick up a flattened bullet, holding it out for Booth to look at himself.

"This was still in the skull," she said, prompting a whistle from Booth at the sight.

".22 calibre," he said reflectively (He might have spent comparatively little time _using_ guns in his centuries of life, but he'd been shot often enough that he had a good idea of what bullets went with what gun). "Matches the gun he was holding. Did you open up the suitcase?"

"Nope," Bones replied as she put the bullet back down.

"Why not?" Booth asked.

"It could hold information that would compromise my objectivity," Bones responded

"Oh yeah, like a name and address?" Booth countered; he'd never thought that he'd deal with someone during a crisis who actually seemed to _want_ to make their job harder...

"I prefer to make unbiased initial observations," Bones responded, putting the tickets down before she looked up at something apparently taking place on the balcony behind him. "Is that pure alcohol?"

"Yes, Doctor Brennan," Zach's voice replied, prompting Booth to turn around and see Zach and Hodgins on the walkway above them, Hodgins carrying a beaker in front of him with his arms outstretched and an eager smile on his face that swiftly faded into exasperation as he looked at Zach.

"You really think Goodman is going to let you spike the eggnog after the Fourth of July fiasco?" Bones replied (Booth made a mental note to ask what the 'Fourth of July fiasco' consisted of when they'd dealt with this case).

"Uh, we may have to rethink..." Hodgins muttered as he looked back at the intern.

"Zach, I need you to clean these bones," Bones continued.

"Now?" the young intern asked, clearly shocked at the order.

"Burn..." Hodgins said, laughing slightly.

"And I need you to search the clothing for insect evidence," Bones continued, her attention shifting to Hodgins just as he had turned to walk away.

"Geez, Bones, Merry Christmas..." Booth muttered

"OK, you people, listen to me," Angela said, her voice cutting off further debate; Booth wasn't sure whether to be more surprised at her outfit when he saw her standing at the top of the stairs leading up to the main ramp- a long dark green hat with a red bobble on the end, a long-sleeved top in a lighter green, a short dark green skirt, a dark green waistcoat with smaller red bobbles, and curved pointy shoes- or the fact that she somehow managed to sound authoritative despite the outfit.

"There is a party going on upstairs, OK?" Angela continued, ignoring any apparent thought that her dress might have inspired questions. "A _Christmas_ party. We're going up there. We're going to talk to some people, we're going to sing some carols, we're going to drink some eggnog. You," she added, pointing at Booth with an equally pointed stare, "are going to kiss me under the mistletoe on the lips."

She turned to address Zach and Hodgins with a slightly resigned manner. "I might kiss you guys under the mistletoe too."

She then turned to Bones. "Maybe even you in a festive non-lesbian manner, but we are going to that party."

Looking over at Bones after that last statement out of a lack of anything else to do- Angela certainly had a way of making an interesting impression on you when she wanted to-, Booth couldn't help but smile slightly at the sight of her looking in slight confusion at her best friend before he turned back to Angela.

"OK, maybe we could... compromise a bit?" he asked, trying to find an argument that would placate Angela without Bones getting too snappy at him. "Maybe if we just give Bones a _few_ more minutes to check the body, see if something comes up...?"

"Thank you," Bones said, nodding at him before she looked back up at Zach and Hodgins. "You heard Booth; see if you can find anything for just a few more minutes and then we'll see what comes next."

Exchanging resigned glances, Zach and Hodgins headed off once again, leaving Bones to get back to work as she began to remove the body's clothing.

"Hey, what-?" Booth began.

"We need to move the body to the lab so that Zach can take some samples," Bones said by way of explanation. "If he can't find anything else noteworthy about the remains, we'll go to the party; I've already determined cause of death to my satisfaction."

" _Fine_..." Angela muttered, as she headed over to a nearby table where someone had left a jar of eggnog earlier. "I'll wait here; just _don't_ try and delay this again or you're _really_ going to spoil Christmas..."

Sighing slightly as he glanced at his watch and wandered down to the lower levels so that he could stay out of the way, Booth ignored Zach and Hodgins arriving to take the body to the lab, even as he wondered what Angela would think about spoiled Christmases if she knew about some of the ones he'd had; even putting aside his Christmases as Angelus- when he'd _wanted_ to spoil the holiday; he'd never exactly made a big deal out of it as Liam when he'd been alive the first time-, he'd definitely had a few depressing ones as Angel, ranging from that whole mess when he'd been hunted by the First Evil to that rather complicated mess at Wolfram & Hart; to say that the majority of his employees then hadn't even _cared_ about the holiday was barely even beginning to describe the worst of his problems...

The sudden blaring of alarms as lights began to flash on the thin 'support struts' around the main lab area broke Booth's train of thought.

"What's that?" he asked, spinning around to look urgently at the squints on the table.

"Biological contamination," Goodman replied (Booth hadn't even seen the guy come in; he must have walked onto the platform while he was lost in thought).

Booth didn't need to hear Hodgins suddenly yell Zach's name to know that the situation was bad, but when the doors to the outside world suddenly closed behind him, he knew that the situation had just become worse.

"The doors seal automatically," Angela said, her tone far too calm for Booth's liking in a situation where contamination was involved. "Don't worry about it."

"What do you mean don't worry about it?" he asked, turning to look at her in frustration; he'd actually had _plans_ for the next couple of days, and now he was stuck in the lab with the squints?

"There's no use panicking until we know what it is-" Bones began."

"What _what_ is?" Booth interjected, walking impatiently over to the squints.

"Uh... we might know," Hodgins said, prompting Booth to turn around to be greeted by the somewhat-unusual sight of Zach and Hodgins standing in the lab, dripping wet and dressed only in towels.

"I cut into the fallout shelter bones and the biohazard alarm went off," Zach said, his usual laconic expression seemingly untroubled despite the fact that they were in a now-sealed building.

"Were you conforming to autopsy protocol?" Goodman asked, his usual authority still present despite the current situation.

"One of us was," Zach replied in a low, accusing voice.

"The other was... drinking an eggnog," Hodgins admitted, raising his left hand sheepishly for a moment.

"And you didn't have your mask on?" Goodman asked, groaning in frustration at Hodgin's nod.

* * *

  
"What are those little tiny lights dancing on the ceiling?" Booth asked, pointing upwards at the ceiling of Goodman's office as he and the Jeffersonian administrator tried to get some sleep; the former archaeologist had claimed the couch before Booth could do anything about it, leaving him with no other option but to accept the floor and try to cope with the bizarre side-effects of the antidote that had been provided for them.

God... every time he thought he'd gotten past his issues with his new humanity, something new came up; if it wasn't his lack of his old strength, it was his new vulnerability to human diseases and the subsequent need to receive treatment for them...

"For the third time," Goodman muttered in sleepy frustration, "those are minute firings of neurons on your optic nerve due to your reaction to the anti-fungal cocktail."

"Wow..." Booth said, still staring up at the objects in front of him (Even the part of his mind that consciously registered what he was seeing _couldn't_ be real didn't stop him appreciating the view. "Whoa... they're beautiful..."

"You are stoned, Agent Booth," Goodman said, laughing slightly as he spoke.

"Oh, good," Booth said, letting out his own laugh as he rested his left hand against his forehead. "Let's hope it lasts long enough to keep this from being the worst Christmas of my life."

He acknowledged that he'd probably had worse Christmases in his time, but those had all been as Angel; as far as his memories as _Booth_ were concerned, being stuck in a massive lab with a bunch of people he was only starting to consider friends at best was _not_ how he'd been planning on spending Christmas...

"What are you complaining about?" Goodman asked, as he reached into the sleeping bag, pulling out a wallet and passing Booth a picture from it as he continued to speak. "I don't like to boast but I am the spirit of Christmas in my house. I have a wife and twin five year old daughters. We have family traditions, the most important of which is being together for Christmas."

"Wow, they're beautiful," Booth said, bringing his mind into clear enough focus for him to make out the picture in his hand, showing Goodman and a woman in a blue top sitting on either side of two little girls, each wearing the same orange dress and smiling goofily at the camera...

"Yeah, I have a kid too," he added, taking his own wallet out and pulling out the picture of Parker he always kept on him- he kept his few surviving pictures of Connor in a secure place in his apartment; while it wasn't _entirely_ outside the realm of probability for him to have had a child of Connor's age if he had been human, it would have attracted too many questions about his past that he didn't want to have to deal with- and passing it to Goodman. "His name is Parker; he's four years old. His mother wouldn't marry me, so my parental rights are totally..."

"Vague?" Goodman concluded for Angel as he studied the picture.

"That word's just a little more Christmasier than what I was thinking," Booth replied

In the end he supposed it had been for the best- he'd never been comfortable telling Rebecca much about his life as Booth; he couldn't even imagine how she would have reacted if he'd told her about his time as _Angel_ -, but that didn't stop him from wishing that he could have more of a role in Parker's life than he did.

Why was it, whether he was Angel or Booth, he _still_ couldn't manage to be a good father? His mistakes with Connor might have been more significant- Holtz kidnapping him and raising him in Quor-toth, 'Jasmine' seducing him-, but just because his problems with Parker were more prosaic didn't mean they were less significant...

"He's a fine-looking boy," Goodman said, bringing Booth's thoughts back to the present as he handed the picture of Parker back.

"Yeah, I get him part of Christmas Day," Booth replied, holding the picture up in front of him once more. "I get him an excellent present every year- something really cool-, but this, uh, this year..."

"Yes, this year," Goodman replied, his tone grim.

"What are those little lights on the ceiling?" Booth asked, smiling slightly in an attempt to draw their thoughts away from this particular bleak topic (Even as he noted that he _was_ having some trouble recalling Goodman's previous explanation for the presence of the lights...).

* * *

  
Even if he freely acknowledged that the drugs that were currently in his system were probably responsible for his currently eccentric mood, Booth couldn't help himself when he saw Bones sitting at the platform with a microscope in front of her; sneaking up onto the lab area from the side, he jumped up from behind the 'pod' containing the body, his hands held high in the air and Angela's hat on his head, only for her to show no reaction to his rpresence even after he jumped for a second time.

"Bones," he said, looking at her with an urgent smile, "it's after midnight. Hmm? Christmas Eve Day? Both an Eve and a day; it's a Christmas miracle!"

"Still enjoying your medication, I see," Bones replied in a low voice, not even looking up from her work as he walked around the pod and pulled a chair over from another desk so that he could sit down beside her.

"OK, so what are we looking at?" he asked curiously.

"There are traces of lead and nickel in the dead guy's osteological profile," Bones began, Booth pulling off his hat mid-sentence and leaning over to place his head in his hands.

"You don't seem that upset about missing Christmas," he cut in, deciding to tackle one question he felt he needed an answer to more than any other right now.

He might not have spent much his overall life celebrating the holiday himself, but he'd always understood its importance even as a vampire- even if Angelus preferred to use it as an opportunity for torture; he still recalled one particularly gruesome time Angelus butchered a family and set them up in a mockery of the nativity scene-, and Bones _really_ didn't seem that cut up about it...

"Indications are that Christ- if he existed- was born in late spring, and the celebration of his birth was shifted to coincide with the pagan rite of the winter solace so that early Christians weren't persecuted," Bones began, speaking with a rapid pace that reminded Booth briefly of Fred or Cordelia when they were getting particularly passionate about a topic, before she turned back to her work as though she'd never been interrupted.

"Who are you, like, the Christmas Killer?" Booth asked (He couldn't quite believe he'd just phrased it like that; he'd spent _way_ too much time with Cordelia and Buffy).

"It's the truth-" Bones began briefly.

"No, it _sounds_ like the truth because it's so rational, right?" Booth said, staring at her in slight dejection; he went to all that effort to get his redemption, and the woman he was working with to ensure it couldn't even get the point of why people sometimes _needed_ to believe there was more out there than what they could see. "But the... you know, the _true_ truth is... you hate Christmas so you just... spout out all these facts and you ruin it for everyone else."

"I ruin the true truth with facts?" Bones said, looking at him in confusion.

"Yeah and you ruin it for the squint squad too by making them work on a case about a guy who's been sealed up in a fallout shelter for fifty years," Booth continued, seizing the opening she'd given him and hoping that he could use it to its fullest extent.

"Well, how would you like me to spend my Christmas?" Bones asked, turning to look directly at him.

"Christmas," Booth said, leaning in closer to her, "is the perfect time to re-examine your standing with... you know," he finished, pointing upwads.

He might not believe in the traditional _idea_ of God- what he'd seen as Angel had left him uncertain if there was a _single_ all-powerful entity responsible for everything, even if he knew that there was _something_ up there-, but Christianity still had a good message behind it, and acknowledging the existence of a higher power of any kind was definitely _something_ you should keep in mind.

Sometimes, in Booth's experience, everyone needed to believe there was something out there greater than yourself looking out for you; just because the Powers so rarely took action when he'd actually _needed_ them didn't mean he didn't recognise the moments when they _had_ helped him...

"A helicopter pad?" Bones asked, cutting off Booth's reflective train of thought.

"Oh, right, right," he said, trying to bring his focus back with a mocking joke (How long were these drugs meant to take to work their way through his system?). "You can't measure the man upstairs in the beaker, so he can't possibly exist."

"The man upstairs?" Bones repeated in confusion.

"Mmm," Booth nodded, smiling slightly as he continued to stare at her, waving a finger in her face to make sure she got his point. "You know, you don't know if you're sick but you're more than willing to take drugs just in case. Seems to me you could give the man upstairs the same benefit of the doubt that you do an invisible fungus, mmm?"

For a moment, the two simply stared at each other, and then Booth walked away, pausing only briefly to grab the hat as he departed.

Without his vampiric abilities, he couldn't do anything to _make_ her believe there was something else out there; all he could do was say his piece and let her react to it as she saw fit.

* * *

  
When Booth had first been presented with Lionel's missing person's file, his first thought had been simply to let Bones know what he'd found, but when he approached the Holographics lab where she was currently working, something inside him told him to slow down even before he started to hear her voice.

"Russ found our presents in my parents' room..." Bones was saying as he walked in through the door, prompting him to halt in the doorway as he watched Bones talking silently with Angela on a couch that had been positioned close to a holographically-created tree, "and Christmas Eve, while I was asleep, he snuck down and... made Christmas, trying to do the right thing for me."

"Christmas for his little sister," Angela said, prompting a brief flash of recollection from Booth of his own old role as an older brother to Kathy, back when he'd still been Liam; even at his worst, before Darla sired him, he'd always tried to do what he could to help her, ranging from helping her to say her prayers to taking her out riding when things became rough at home...

Right up to the moment when he'd walked out on her after one last argument, only to come back and drink her blood as one of his first crimes as a vampire.

"But when I came down, and saw the lights and the presents..." Bones began, a slight tremor in her voice as she spoke.

"You thought your parents were back," Angela finished for her.

"I just expected to see them sitting there, drinking their coffee, watching Russ and me open our presents," Bones finished, looking tearfully over at Angela, a simple dejection at her childhood inability to comprehend what her brother had done for her that Booth sympathised with all too well; he'd always cared for Kathy as Liam, but he'd never realised just how much he'd depended on her simple faith in him until she wasn't there to have it any more.

"Oh my God," Angela said, leaning over to place a sympathetic hand on Bones's arm as Booth just stood silently behind them, wishing he could tell that beautiful, broken forensic anthropologist just how much he understood her in that moment.

"I kind of lost it," Bones continued, her head shaking slightly as she subconsciously tried to deny the painful memory- something that Angel had long experience with- even as she clearly resolved to continued. "I refused to open the presents until they came back. It was like I told Russ he wasn't enough family for me. Before New Year's, he... went out west to... work... and I was in the foster system."

"Excuse me?" Booth said, stepping forward slightly to draw their attention back to him; judging by how close Bones looked to a breakdown, it would probably be best for everyone if he stepped in now before anyone said anything they'd regret later. "We have, uh, Lionel's missing persons file."

Nodding briefly at him, Bones turned back to look at Angela.

"The tree is really, really beautiful, Ange," she said, a tearful smile on her face even as she clearly began to bring herself under control once again. "Really."

With that, she stood up and walked over to take the file from him, the two of them walking out of the lab as Angela watched them.

* * *

  
As he sat at the bar at Wong Fu's, casually drinking his beer as he savoured the simple freedom of being out of the lab once again, Booth wasn't sure what he appreciated more; the upcoming meeting with Parker to spend what was left of Christmas with him, or the unique chance he'd had to bond with the squint squad over the last couple of days.

It hadn't exactly been an ideal situation, he admitted, but after so long barely able to spend more than a few minutes at a time between investigations with the rest of the squints- mostly when he came into the Jeffersonian he spoke for a bit with Bones and that was that-, he'd really enjoyed the chance to spend time with them when they _didn't_ have a murder dominating their time. From learning about Goodman's daughters, to the unexpected twist revelation of the identity of Angela's father, to Zach's surprising fondness for a family-orientated Christmas, to Bones's issues with the holiday...

It hadn't all been cheery, but it had been... nice, he supposed was the best term.

For the first time since he'd said his last goodbyes to Spike and Illyria- the only members of his original team left conscious and standing; Gunn was still in a coma and Lorne had 'ascended' to that higher plane following that attempted disruption of the Music of the Spheres-, he'd actually felt like he was part of a _family_ again, even if the other squints probably didn't think of him that way...

Looking up at the sound of footsteps, Booth smiled as he saw Bones walking up to sit down alongside him, Sid almost automatically handing her a drink as she did so.

"Drinks?" she said, looking at him in surprise.

"Ah yes," Sid said, smiling at her, a grin that fitted his current attire of a Santa hat. "Christmas spirits, well, they come in... many a guise."

"Cheers," Booth said, holding up his own mug, he, Sid and Bones exchanging briefly clinks of their glasses before Sid walked off to attend to other customers.

"Ivy Gillespie came to the lab after you left with her granddaughter," Bones said, turning to look at Booth with a smile after a brief sip of her drink.

Booth couldn't help but smile at that comment; he could already picture how _that_ particular scene had gone...

"Don't you want to know what happened?" Bones asked, still smiling at him even if she didn't fully understand why he was doing it himself.

"I know what happened," Booth replied, looking back at her with his own smile. "You told her about Careful Lionel. You showed her the letters, the tickets, she cried, but you made her happy."

"Not to mention I gave her a penny worth over a hundred thousand dollars," Bones pointed out.

"She won't care about that today," Booth replied, reflecting on how he'd felt back when Connor had told him that he'd forgiven him; after everything else that they'd been through over the years since Connor's birth, the simple knowledge that Connor forgave him had been everything he needed. "You just gave somebody the best Christmas gift they could ever get. Who's the secret Santa now?"

"Stop," Bones replied, prompting the robot Zach had given him to give to Parker- currently standing on the bar table beside him, waiting for Parker to come and receive it- to lean forward and start doing push-ups.

"Oh," Booth said, exchanging amused laughs with Bones as they looked at the robot. "That weirdo assistant of yours just made me the coolest dad in the world."

"Daddy!" Parker's voice suddenly yelled, Booth looking up in time to briefly see the FBI agent who'd been keeping an eye on Parker during his quarantine at the door before his arms were filled with the small, warm body of his son.

"Hey, look," he said, picking up the robot to show it to Parker with a broad smile; he might have enjoyed the occasional moment when he'd bonded with Connor over fighting together- even if Connor had been intending to betray him to 'avenge' Holtz-, but there was something nice about giving Parker a chance at a more normal childhood. "Look at this thing."

"Does it flip?" Parker asked, taking the robot to study it more closely.

"It can flip, trip, swim, whatever you want," Booth replied, before he leaned in to whisper in his son's ear, indicating Bones with a slight nod of his head. "Can you say Merry Christmas?"

"Merry Christmas," Parker said, waving briefly at Bones after she waved back.

Even as Booth walked off out of the bar, he couldn't resist a slight smile at the meeting that had just taken place; the two most important people in his new life had finally met...

He didn't allow himself to consider the implications of that automatic thought; the fact that his relationship with Tessa had only ended recently was the _least_ of the reasons for him not to think of Bones that way...


	11. The Woman at the Airport

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we have it; "The Woman at the Airport", in which Booth returns to his/Angel's old stomping grounds (Along with an original scene that I felt _had_ to be written)

"Do we have to go through this every time?" Doctor Goodman asked as he sat behind his desk and looked in frustration at the two partners.

"Exactly," Booth began.

"Booth can't just walk in and say 'pack your bags; we're going to LA'," Bones interrupted, snapping her fingers to emphasise her point (Despite himself, Booth had to admit to being impressed; she was coming along pretty well at the whole 'being normal' thing).

"Oh, yeah, yeah, the whole Ice Age warrior thing," Booth said, nodding in feigned understanding (He might have recognised the power of the past thanks to his time as Angel, but researching that kind of thing just for the sake of researching it had never entirely made sense to him).

"Iron Age," Bones and Goodman corrected him simultaneously in a bored voice that reminded him of Cordelia when he'd said something socially stupid.

"And that's not the only thing," Bones added.

"Homeland Security has asked Doctor Brennan to identify three bodies found dead in..." Goodman began, indicating her with one hand as he spoke.

"I'm not allowed to say," Bones interjected (Not that Booth minded either way; if the government wanted Bones somewhere else, she was a valuable enough resource- as much as he thought of her as a person beyond her talents- that they wouldn't send her anywhere dangerous without a decent security detachment).

"The point is, Agent Booth," Goodman said, turning to face Booth, "Doctor Brennan is in great demand on several pressing cases and she's needed here at the museum. Why should I send her to California?"

"Sexy case in Hollywood," Booth replied, a slight smile on his face at the thought. "How much more good press could the Jeffersonian get?"

He wasn't denying that the prospect of taking Bones to 'his' old city was an intriguing one as well- it had been far too long since he'd been to Los Angeles, even if he doubted that he'd run into any of his old friends on this case; it would be too awkward to explain to either the friend or Bones why him being in the sunlight was something that people shouldn't be concerned about-, but Goodman's sudden lean forward suggested that what explanations he'd given had been sufficient to inspire the former archaeologist's interest.

"But Doctor Goodman," Bones protested, realising that Booth's words had made an impact on her boss, "you said the Iron Age warrior was of the highest priority?"

"I can step in on that case," Goodman said, tilting his head slightly in an amused manner. "You pack your bags.

Booth couldn't resist the temptation to smile over at Bones as Goodman voiced his decision.

 _Back to the city of Angels I go_... he reflected as he stood up and headed for the door, calling briefly back at Bones to let her know he'd be outside even as his thoughts focused on what was coming up.

Maybe _now_ he'd manage to see the parts of Los Angeles that attracted people there now that he didn't have to worry about the demon side of the equation...

* * *

  
Looking back on his return visit to the city that had been his home for the better part of five years so far, Booth had to admit that nothing had gone entirely as he had expected it would. Not only had he not had the time even to take a brief look at his old office or the Hyperion- not that either of them would be the same; not only had both the original Angel Investigations office and the Wolfram & Hart building been destroyed even before he left the city, but from what he'd gathered in his research the Hyperion had returned to its old closed state after he'd left and the rest of the team had gone... wherever they'd gone..., but he was definitely _not_ getting a look at the lives that people came to Los Angeles to find.

Granted, he wasn't here to live that kind of life himself, but that didn't change the fact that so far Los Angeles wasn't looking that much more appealing to a human resident than it would to someone in the demonic side of things; the hotel rooms they were in might be nice, but that was about it.

"According to LAPD," Bones said as they sat opposite Ivana Bardu, head of the escort agency that they had tracked the victim to, "a black market breast implant from the same shipment showed up in another girl from Aphrodite Escorts."

"Are you missing anyone?" Special Agent Tricia Finn- Booth couldn't help but wonder if she was some relation to Riley; little connections to his past as Angel always niggled at him in that regard- asked the older woman, with an abruptness that put Booth briefly in mind of Cordelia.

"We're not looking into your business, Miss Bardu," Booth put in; remembering the issues that Madame Dorion had had with his presence when he was trying to help David Nabbit the first time, it seemed like the most obvious explanation for her current discomfort. "We're just trying to solve a murder."

"I haven't heard from Rachel in two weeks," Miss Bardu said with a casual nonchalance.

"Is that unusual?" Finn asked.

"I prefer to ask the questions my own way, Agent Finn," Booth said, looking briefly up at her, noting but otherwise ignoring her slightly hurt expression at his words. "Thanks."

"Rachel booked out at a one week rate," Miss Bardu replied, apparently unconcerned about the interruption but with a slight apprehension in her tone that at least gave Booth an indication that she was genuinely concerned about the missing girl. "She knows to check in with me if the client wants to extend the contract. It's time to worry."

"Do any of these woman resemble Rachel?" Bones asked, passing her a folder containing some of the digital representations that Angela had made of their victim's possible facial structure (Booth was still a bit hazy on how plastic surgery could make that much of an impact on Angela's ability to make an accurate ID of their victim's appearance at the time of her death; he got that it would make the 'flesh markers'- or something like that- a bit confusing, but that was about it...).

"If I had to pick one," Miss Bardu said, briefly lifting one of the pictures out of the folder, "this is the closest, but not really."

"Does Rachel have a last name?" Booth asked as he took the folder back.

"Rachel wasn't even her real first name," Miss Bardu replied, a brief smile on her face.

"She goes by Rachel Ashaunce," Finn interjected from the corner.

"Rachel went to Vegas with a long-time customer," Miss Bardu continued.

"I need his name," Booth said, not entirely surprised when Miss Bardu simply leant back silently in her seat. "Miss Bardu, it's always the same story; beautiful young woman, somebody wants to meet her, somebody can't have her, somebody dies."

"Doctor Anton Kostov, an assembly line nip/tucker in town," Miss Bardu answered after a moment's pause. "If that's all?"

"Do you have a card, Miss Bardu?" Booth asked, smiling slightly at her while ignoring Bones's stare; it might give the wrong impression, but one thing he'd learned from his time as Angel was to never ignore any possible avenue of inquiry until it was totally exhausted.

"We provide a law enforcement discount," Miss Bardu said, smiling slightly at him as she passed him a card from her bag, Booth simply nodding in response as he took the offered card without bothering to correct her assumption.

"Miss Bardu," Bones asked, clearly wanting to get the conversation back to a topic that she was more comfortable with, "do you have any idea of what Rachel looked like before her plastic surgery?"

"Which time?" Miss Bardu responded with a brief smile before she walked out of the interview area.

Booth didn't need to be an expert in the field to know that things had just become more complicated; how were they meant to figure out what this woman looked like when she'd changed her face on _more_ than one occasion...

* * *

  
As he walked through the office of the FBI's Los Angeles division- he almost wished he'd paid more attention to any contacts Wolfram & Hart had in this agency; as much as he hated that part of his life, he'd take anything if it meant improving his chances of figuring out who'd been killed in the first place-, Booth was just looking for somewhere quiet for him to sit and think when it happened.

"Agent Booth," Finn's voice said, prompting him to turn around and look in her direction as she ran up behind him, "can I have a moment, please?"

Without responding verbally, Booth turned around and walked off to a corner of the room before turning back to face the other agent.

"Have I done something to offend you?" Finn asked.

"Look," Booth said uncomfortably- even after so long in Los Angeles, he'd never felt comfortable discussing feelings like this with people he'd only just met-, "I'm really not into this whole, west coast, 'in touch with your feelings' thing, so-"

"Yeah," Finn said, speaking before he could properly start walking away, "um, I'm really good at my job, and I've been nothing but cooperative and helpful to you, but you just freeze me out."

Booth simply hummed in a noncommittal manner as he waited for her to say anything else.

"And I know you have nothing against working with women because you're partners with Doctor Brennan," Finn continued, "so your problem must be with me."

"Look, I don't have anything against you, Agent Finn," Booth said as he turned to look at her, Finn's appearance briefly replaced by the memory of a thin man with overly spiky hair who'd tried to be him without understanding his motives; David hadn't understood what he was really about until the end, and it had resulted in his death. "I just don't like the way you view the FBI."

"What do you mean?" Finn asked.

"This is a proud and noble job, but you're using it to get something else," Booth said, glaring pointedly at Finn as he spoke, hoping she'd get his point.

After all, he'd been where Agent Finn was himself once, even if his motives had been significantly different from hers; he wasn't denying that he'd essentially done what he'd just accused Finn of doing back when he'd first learned about the Shanshu Prophecy when he still ran Angel Investigations- fighting for what he'd get in the end rather than fighting for the sake of actually doing some good-, but working towards your spiritual redemption and working towards getting a movie-writing career were _far_ from the same thing.

"My advice?" he said, as he took a couple of steps forward to stand more directly in front of her, his height once again working to his advantage. "Write your script, get an agent- Hell, have a little plastic surgery-, but quit using my Federal Bureau of Investigation as a stepping stool into something that you think is better, because in my book, there is nothing better."

As he walked away from Finn, Booth was surprised to find that he meant what he'd said.

Admittedly, he might have made a larger-scale impact when he was Angel in the supernatural sense, but he wasn't exactly useless now that he was Booth either; he'd already put away a decent few murderers even before he'd started working with Bones, and things just kept on improving now that they were permanent partners.

He could never go back to saving the world like he had done when he was Angel- he'd lost too much back then to really feel right in that role, and he _definitely_ couldn't push himself physically the way he could before-, but Seeley Booth wasn't exactly a slouch when it came to saving lives his way.

* * *

  
"Scenario number one," Booth said as he and Bones drove down the street, their latest attempt to prompt a confession from the plastic surgeon having met with failure, "prostitute gets breast augmentation from plastic surgeon in return for sex; she threatens to tell on him."

"Plausible," Bones said, a slight uncertainty in her voice that hinted that she didn't agree with what she'd said.

"Scenario number two," Booth continued, trying to ignore his partner's tone, "jealous boyfriend…well, yada yada …you know the rest. Which do you like?"

"Neither," Bones replied.

"Because there's no real evidence," Booth said, allowing his slight frustration at their lack of information to seep through into his tone; they'd been working at this case for two days and they still knew nothing about the murder beyond the technical details.

"Unless you count a volley ball," Bones added, the two sitting in silence for a few metres before Bones spoke again. "Sounds like you're getting ready to quit."

"Quit?" Booth repeated, looking back at Bones for a moment before he sighed in frustration. "No, it's just the Deputy Director wants me to hand the case over to the LA field office; we're supposed to give Agent Finn what we've got and go home."

"What?" Bones said indignantly. "Forget it; you don't even _like_ Agent Finn, you think she's an idiot-"

"Bones," Booth interrupted, "the whole case is a bust; it's a blank. I mean, we don't have anything. We checked her apartment, nothing. There are no pictures, nothing. We don't know what she looks like, we don't know her name..."

"It's like she lived _on_ the world instead of in it," Bones said, prompting Booth to sharply glance at her at that last comment, his mind momentarily flashing back to the time when that phrase could have been applied to him.

He'd done what he could to fit into the world after he'd started dating Buffy, but even after all the time he'd spent with the rest of the team- even after his dates with Nina-, he'd only really felt like he'd _belonged_ in the world again after he'd become human once more; his time as Angel had been defined by the distance between himself and the rest of the human race...

"You have to tell him he's wrong," Bones said, her words breaking into Booth's brain as he quickly went over what he'd heard while he was distracted; she was talking about the director saying he was at a loose end.

Taking his eyes off the road to look at her for a moment, Booth pulled in at the first likely-looking parking space he found, turned the engine off, and turned to look at her; this was definitely the kind of conversation that required _all_ of his attention.

"Is he wrong?" he asked, hoping Bones wouldn't take it the wrong way; as much as he trusted her, the fact remained that they'd really had relatively little luck getting anywhere with this case so far.

"We know we're looking for someone who grew up in New England and moved here about eight years ago," Bones began, an earnest resolution in her voice as she spoke. "Her leg was crushed in a car accident when she was thirteen; she was on a boat shortly before she was murdered. We know some of her names and some of her faces."

"That's all your stuff," Booth said, unable to stop the depression entering his voice

"Usually by now we know more about my stuff."

"We have separate stuff?" Bones asked, looking at him in confusion.

"Yeah," Booth confirmed, his voice low as he looked back at his partner. "By now, I usually have a feel for the person, what they wanted, how they felt, what was going on in their lives; with this girl..."

He sighed. "Nothing."

He could think of so many reasons why someone in this girl's position _could_ have died, but without any idea about her real name or history, there was no way to know what she _really_ would have done...

"She thought she was ugly," Bones said after a moment's pause, prompting a brief spark of hope in Booth; it might be minor, but any moment where Bones demonstrated some kind of understanding of people was a step in the right direction in his book. "She did everything she could to make herself beautiful… and all she did was make herself more invisible."

"Everybody in this city thinks they're ugly, and nobody is," Booth said, shaking his head as he remembered Rebecca Lowell's attempt to get him to turn her; she might not have been able to get the kind of roles that had made her career any more, but that shouldn't have stopped her from trying to go beyond that to become something new. "I'm starting to get why you hate anonymous death so much."

"We were born unique," Bones said (Booth wondered how she'd react if she ever learned just how unique he'd been before they'd met). "Our experiences mold and change us; we become someone, all of us, and to have that taken away by murder, to be _erased_ from existence against our will, it's just-"

"Evil?" Booth suggested.

It was one of those rare moments when Bones was particularly passionate about the current topic she was discussing while he could simultaneously relate to the topic. He didn't always get her when she was talking about bones as part of her archaeological duties- or even when she was talking about some details relating to their current victims-, but for the moment, even if it wasn't the same kind of evil that he was familiar with from his time as Angel, they were discussing something that both of them felt passionate about.

"Unacceptable," Bones corrected, still talking rapidly (Booth briefly contemplated her reaction if she knew of the evil he'd seen in his life, and just as quickly rejected it; she had enough to deal with human monsters without being given an idea of the evil he had once fought). "These bones you bring me, I give them a face. I say their names out loud. I return them to their loved ones and you arrest the bad guy; I like that."

"So do I," Booth said, smiling back at her despite his still-depressed mood.

It was one part of his life as Booth that he definitely preferred to his time as Angel; at least as Booth, he was able to give people answers, whereas when he'd been Angel he'd sometimes had to _conceal_ the answers from the bereaved due to their potential inability to understand what had happened to their loved ones.

It might be depressing that he failed to save them, but at least he could say that he could give the victim's family answers when he couldn't do anything else for them.

"I feel like we should be arresting these doctors," Bones said, the moment apparently passing for her almost as quickly as it had originally come, "because whether they killed her or not they… they still erased her."

"Well..." Booth said, putting his sunglasses back on as he turned his attention back to the road in preparation for starting the car, "maybe I could hold Cullen off for a day."

"It's not good enough," Bones said, but the slight tone of acknowledgement in her voice was enough for Booth.

"You're welcome," Booth replied, as he started the car and began to drive away just as Bones's cell phone began to ring

"Brennan," she said as she answered the phone, pausing for a moment as she listened to the voice on the other end before she spoke again, a smile on her face at the news. "You compared the bones to the marks left on her jaw? That's… brilliant, Zack."

After another brief pause as she listened to the speaker on the other end of the line- and Booth could only hope that Zack was living up to Brennan's expectations of him; right now they needed a breakthrough in this case-, Bones spoke again. "Tell me he's in LA."

Before Booth could reach the point where he felt obliged to ask for information, Bones had terminated the connection and turned to look at him. "Doctor Henry Atlas, Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills. Go."

With that instruction, Booth put his foot down on the accelerator and began to drive towards the named area, his mind already buzzing with the possibilities of what they'd find there as he listened to Bones's explanation for heading to this particular location.

Even if Doctor Atlas wasn't the murderer, the fact that he'd designed a rare tool that had served as the murder weapon was definitely _not_ something they could dismiss as coincidence...

* * *

  
Later that following night, the case concluded, the killer arrested, and plans already in motion to contact the victim's parents, Booth found himself standing in front of the remains of a once-again-abandoned old hotel, Bones unaware of his current location as she rested in her bed.

It was probably a pointless thing to do, he acknowledged- his team hadn't used it as a headquarters in _this_ plane of existence for over a year before he'd been given his Shanshu, and they'd spent so little time in it when they were in Hell that it hardly counted-, but after he'd vanished from that life so abruptly after setting his last couple of affairs in order, he'd have been lying if he claimed that he didn't feel any sense of nostalgia towards the building before him.

Besides, after the complete erasure of the Wolfram & Hart office after he and Wesley had forced them to expend so many resources to bring him back to life after his last fight in Hell- he sometimes wondered if they'd ever managed to recover _anything_ after he'd been given his Shanshu and thus escaped any possibility of fighting for their side in their planned Apocalypse-, coupled with the destruction of his original offices during Vocah's attack, out of all his residences over his eight years fighting alongside Buffy or fighting with his own team, this was the only one left standing, and hence the only true reminder he had left that his time as Angel had been real and not just some strange dream.

The hotel might be locked- and he wasn't going to enter it; it might not be _impossible_ for him to gain access but it would probably attract too many questions if he was caught-, but after the slightly unnerving experience of meeting Doctor Atlas- that man's resemblance to Richard Wilkins was uncanny; the part of Booth that would always be Angel had to wonder if the man had been some distant relative of Sunnydale's now-deceased mayor from before the guy had made the deal that resulted in the development of Sunnydale-, Booth hadn't been able to resist another chance to look at the reminder of the good he'd accomplished in his life.

The demon that had once inhabited this hotel was gone, and, in a place whose history had once been defined by murder and destruction, the only thing that remained for those who had lived there were memories of a location where they could find some degree of safety and security from the chaos of the world around them…

And, for a few brief years, it had been the first place where the first vampire with a soul had found what could legitimately be thought of as his family (His bond with Buffy in Sunnydale had been an important connection, but he'd never really managed to _connect_ with the other Scoobies while he was there; they'd been Buffy's friends rather than his own).

It had been a good, if strange, life while he lived there…

But it was gone.

This building before him was nothing but a reminder of his long-gone past; his life as Angel had been good, but even if he had retained his vampiric strength, he could never go back to the way things had been back in those days.

He was a different man now; he had a son, he had an official job, he had qualifications, he had paperwork, he had a passport…

He _existed_.

Looking at the hotel in front of him one last time, he smiled softly.

"Goodbye," he said, the comment being addressed to nobody in particular.

With that, he turned around and walked away from the hotel, the building that had been his home for three years left in its old state behind him, its previous history as far in the building's past as his own was.

Tomorrow morning, it was back to Washington with Bones, where whatever future awaited him would come for him once more.


	12. The Woman in the Car

"Polina and Carl separated three months ago," Bones explained as she studied the papers containing the information they'd managed to find about their victim's family life. "Separate addresses for mom and dad."

"Well, we know that mom was in your lab," Booth said, allowing himself a brief smile as he drove; the simple parts of cases were always relaxing in their way. "Let's go find dad."

"You wrestle someone really small lately?" Bones asked from out of the blue as she studied the files, prompting Booth to look over at her inquiringly as she indicated the back of the car. "Car seat in the back."

"Oh, I had Parker for the weekend," Booth replied briefly, momentarily lost in the memory of the brief time with his son; it wasn't as much as he'd like, but after missing out on the entirety of Connor's childhood, any chance he got at time with Parker was something he treasured...

"I don't know how you do that," Bones said, the concentration on her face as she studied the files before her suggesting that she was almost thinking out loud.

"Install a car seat in an FBI vehicle?" Booth asked, in what he already knew was a poor attempt to lighten the mood in the face of what was bound to be an awkward question from his partner.

"Bring a kid into this world knowing what you know," Bones clarified, looking over at him with that familiar slightly exasperated sigh she used when he said something that she didn't think was funny. "I'll bet Parker was an accident, right? Because his mother wouldn't marry you?"

Despite his embarrassment, Booth couldn't help but laugh at the sudden line of questioning from his partner; these little moments when she displayed a lack of tact that would have shocked _Cordelia_ were kind of cute, in their own way...

"What?" Bones asked, looking at him with that honest confusion about what she'd just done that Cordelia had lacked.

"It never occurred to you that that might be a sensitive topic?" Booth asked.

"Well, you could have gone with the very small felon story," Bones responded.

"I'm better for Parker being in the world," Booth replied bluntly, memories of the sense of purpose and resolution he'd felt when he first saw Connor's small body adding emphasis to his words (Parker's birth had still been important to him, but as his first-born son Connor's had just made more of an impact). "Someday, _you_ will see that."

"No, I won't," Bones responded, her attention back on the files and her voice so low that it gave Booth the impression she wasn't even bothering to think in depth about her response.

"You'll change your mind," Booth replied simply; if Cordelia could see the positives of the 'mom' situation back when Connor had first come into their lives, he could _definitely_ get Bones to a similar point (And where had _that_ analogy come from?).

"I don't do that," Bones replied in the same low tone.

"You will," Booth replied automatically, his hands gripping the wheel in calm resolution.

"Yeah, maybe after I see how Carl Decker reacts when you tell him his wife is dead and his child has been kidnapped," Bones countered, which neatly put a lid on anything else Booth might have said on that particular topic; kidnap cases had always been a sensitive issue for him ever since he'd joined the Bureau due to the uncomfortable memories they evoked of how he'd lost Connor to Quor-toth so many years ago...

"Yeah, well," he said, trying to cover up his own discomfort at that assessment of the situation before Bones could say anything else, "statistically speaking, we are going to find Donovan with his dad."

"What?" Bones asked, looking at him in sudden confusion. "Why?"

"Why?" Booth repeated, shrugging as he spoke. "Because most kidnappings happen by estranged spouses."

"You're certainly making the whole domestic scene more and more attractive," Bones commented before she turned her attention back to the files, leaving Booth to simply look reflectively at her and wonder how she would react if he explained his _entire_ reasoning to her...

* * *

  
"Well," Cullen said, the two investigators now waiting in Cullen's office for the information they needed about Decker's protective detail, "at least nobody got shot... probably 'cause she didn't have a gun."

"Sir," Booth said, hoping to draw Bones's thoughts away from that avenue- distracting her from anything might be a long shot given her IQ, he knew, but anything to stop her having an excuse to gain the ability to cause further damage-, "why is Carl Decker's home being watched by US Marshals?"

"Carl Decker is a Federal witness under witness protection," Cullen answered, his arms folded as he addressed the two investigators. "He's scheduled to appear before a grand jury in two days."

"Is this a mob thing?" Booth asked; major trials being involved in Decker's life gave him the first semblance of a motive he'd had since he started investigating this case.

"Decker designs body armour for KBC Systems," Cullen answered, pacing his office slightly as he explained; evidently the issue was a complicated one. "He says they knowingly sent defective armour to Iraq; the justice department believes him, so they moved him to a safe house."

"Does the justice department think that Decker is in danger from the company?" Bones asked.

"He thinks he is," Cullen responded. "They want him to testify, they play along."

"Well, does Decker know that his wife has been killed and his child has been kidnapped?" Booth asked, already guessing where this was going.

"No," Cullen replied, shaking his head briefly at Booth. "And they don't want him to know."

"Why?" Bones asked (How someone could be simultaneously so cynical and so naive was a mystery to Booth, but it was still fascinating).

"Because it might prevent him from testifying," Booth clarified, partly wishing he couldn't see their point; there were times when his ability to take in the 'big picture' _really_ made him feel like moral garbage...

"Their point of view is there is nothing to be gained from him knowing," Cullen added, his voice resolute as he looked between the two.

"Except maybe Decker chooses not to testify and they don't kill his son," Bones pointed out, her usual habit of cutting to the point impressing and frustrating Booth as it always did. "Shouldn't that be his decision?"

"Justice estimates that KBC Systems is directly responsible for thirty deaths and hundreds of injuries," Cullen countered as he walked up to his desk. "They're taking a larger view; it's complicated."

"His wife is dead and his child is missing; that's not so complicated," Booth countered; even with Gunn to offer him legal advice back in the day, he'd never understood why some people felt the need to make everything so damn _complicated_...

"No one is stopping you from investigating those crimes-" Cullen began.

"He's a material witness," Booth interjected; as much as he tried to respect his superiors, this was one issue where he definitely had to make his thoughts on the topic known. "I need access to him."

"Well, we know Decker didn't kill his wife- he was in custody of US Marshals-, so start looking someplace else," Cullen elaborated, before he sighed, turned around, and walked out of the office. "Harsh life, Booth; deal with it."

"Does he not like me?" Bones asked uncertainly, as Cullen vanished from view.

"I don't know," Booth replied, shaking his head in frustration as he turned away from his partner.

There were definitely some situations that _no_ amount of life experience could fully prepare you for, and explaining in detail to Doctor Temperance Brennan just how she could rub some people up the wrong way was one of them...

* * *

  
As he stood on the other side of Bones's desk, watching a video of Decker teaching Donovan how to ride a bike, Booth had to wonder at the variety of ways people came up with as opportunities for parent/child bonding in the present; he and his father had practically spent _no_ time together while he was growing up (When he was Liam, anyway; things with _Booth's_ father led to areas that he wouldn't have wanted to talk about even if it _didn't_ feel a bit like lying to discuss them), and nowadays there were so many ways and means for them to spend time together it was almost ridiculous (Although he _did_ enjoy the chance to do most of them with Parker)...

The sudden pausing of the tape cut off his reflections, prompting him to glance inquiringly over at his partner. "Why'd you stop?"

"What are we hoping to learn from this tape?" Bones asked, continuing to talk even as Booth sighed in exasperation. "We know Carl Decker didn't kidnap his own child. The mother is dead and the boy-"

"And the boy might be dead, too," Booth finished for her; he didn't want to hear how she would have phrased her assessment of the situation.

"Well, I'm just wondering..." Bones began, looking quizzically at him as she indicated the screen. "What is the benefit of watching this tape?"

"You put names to faces, you get a sense of human beings..." Booth elaborated, waving a hand slightly to try and express the variety of information that could be gained (He acknowledged that he wouldn't have done this kind of thing as Angel, but with demons you often had to move a _lot_ faster to find what you had to stop; at least the information they'd gathered about this case so far suggested they had time to try and form a complete picture of the situation). "Aw, c'mon, Bones; you're the anthropologist, what does this tape tell you?"

"Learning to ride a bicycle is a... kind of rite of passage," Bones replied, indicating the screen with the remote. "It has anthropological significance."

"Really?" Booth asked, curious despite himself as to how Bones had come to that assessment.

"It carries meaning beyond the simple mechanics of learning to ride a bike," Bones continued.

"Are you being psychological?" Booth asked, unable to stop a slight smile despite the grim nature of the current case; after all the times she'd said that she didn't believe in psychology, to hear her essentially arguing _for_ it...

"Definitely not," Bones refuted. "Psychology is about the _individual_ ; I'm speaking to a set of cultural proxies and mores."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Booth asked.

"The father is tight," Bones explained, turning around to better indicate the frozen image on the TV screen before them. "He's holding his arms, touching his mouth."

"So he's nervous," Booth said. "So what?"

"Look at the boy," Bones continued, indicating the screen once again. "He's relaxed. He's... he's not afraid."

"Oh, so why was the boy stalling then, huh?" Booth countered (He knew that he sounded overly hostile, but arguing with Bones gave him something to focus on apart from the missing kid).

"He's not; the father is," Bones clarified. "The son understands that on some level and he's enabling his father to reach some level of comfort. It's a symbiotic relationship."

Despite his own incredulity at the idea of Bones being this insightful, Booth had to admit that she had a certain point.

After all, back before he'd been abducted by Holtz, hadn't Connor shown an instinctive 'trust'- of sorts, anyway; he freely acknowledged that it could just have been the vampire part of Connor's nature recognising him as 'sire'- of Angel even when he was in his 'vamp face'?

Kids could sometimes get a whole lot more than their parents realised...

"Relationship," he said, trying to pass off his moment of thought as he looked at Bones with a slight smile. "That's psychology."

"The boy trusts his father, absolutely," Bones continued, only briefly acknowledging his point. "He's confident. The father wishes he didn't have to do this but he's accepted that he must in his role as a father."

Booth let out a contemplative huff at that assessment.

"What?" Bones asked

"Probably the same way Decker felt about being a whistle blower," Booth clarified, although he acknowledged that Bones's statement was accurate in its original content as well; he'd certainly made more than one difficult decision when he was trying to help Connor, even if Connor definitely hadn't trusted _him_ at the time...

"That's psychology and it's of no use to us in this current investigation," Bones said, pointing the remote at him in a reinforcing manner that brought his mind back to the current topic; reflections about Connor could wait until Donovan Decker was safe.

"Just... push play, OK?" Booth asked, getting himself back into position leaning against Bones's desk as he looked at the screen.

Even as the tape started, Booth was already trying to figure out what kind of answer they could provide for the most obviously challenging question facing them at this time.

How the _hell_ were they going to find that kid...?

* * *

  
As he sat in the KBC Systems conference room, staring at company head Trent Seward, Booth hated to admit it even to himself, but he almost hoped this guy _was_ responsible for Donovan's abduction, if only because he _really_ wanted an excuse to hit the bastard; he reminded him far too much of some of the people he'd had to deal with during his time at Wolfram & Hart for Booth to feel _remotely_ relaxed.

"Carl Decker is not only a disgruntled employee," Seward said, in a tone that suggested

"Uh, what... what's the term?"

"As a lawyer," the blond woman whose cold attitude reminded him of Lilah- although that might have just been simple transference; he never liked people who treated any branch of law enforcement as just a job- "the legal term is, 'nuts and a pain in the ass'."

"Oppositional defiance disorder and paranoia is what I read," Seward commented (The fact that he didn't even seem to be that bothered about one of his even former employees only reinforced Booth's increasingly-lowering opinion of the man before him).

"Like I said," the lawyer said nonchalantly, "nuts and a pain in the ass."

"Read where?" Booth asked, looking at the two with a neutral expression. "Paranoia; you read that where?"

In response, the lawyer slid a blue file in the table in front of them over to him, Booth only requiring a brief glance at its contents to know what it was about.

"You had Carl Decker investigated?" he asked, studying the papers in front of him; the things some people were willing to do for money disgusted him at times.

"He's making extremely damaging accusations against the company," the lawyer commented, as though there was nothing untoward about their response to that situation.

"False accusations," Seward added (The more that man denied it, the more Booth was sure it was true; he was trying _way_ too hard to create the idea of himself as the victim for Booth's liking).

"Can you think of anyone who would want to kill his wife and kidnap his son?" Booth asked; if they weren't going to admit it, he might as well see what other suspects they had 'prepared' for him to investigate...

"It wasn't us," the lawyer said automatically.

"I didn't say it was," Booth countered.

"Oh please, we have to top your list of suspects," the lawyer said, the statement such a straightforwardly factual point that Booth wasn't sure if he should interpret it as overconfidence in their innocence, a ploy to misdirect him by drawing attention to their status, or simple frustration at being accused like that in the first place.

"Look," Seward said, "we have an in house system for dealing with whistle blowers. We encourage it. I served in 'nam, Agent Booth. I saw what soldiers see. If I read you correctly, you know what I mean."

The ironic thing was that Seward's assessment of Booth was both right and wrong- he might have memories of his time as an official soldier, but he'd been a _warrior_ as Angel for far longer than he'd served in any army-, but he didn't feel inclined to share that under normal circumstances, and certainly not with a man he was finding himself increasingly disliking every moment he spent in his company.

"Army," he said, deciding that he might as well respond with the more 'realistic' answer if he wanted to avoid the possibility of causing more potential tension with the other man by contradicting him than he needed to. "75th regiment."

"Rangers lead the way," Seward said, with what was probably supposed to be a comradely smile, before he leaned forward with a more solemn, resolute expression. "I would never risk the lives of soldiers by knowingly providing them with defective armour, and I welcome Carl Decker's appearance at the grand jury because he is wrong."

"Carl Decker did brilliant work for us but he alienated everyone he worked with," the lawyer said, her tone clearly indicating that she considered this conversation over. "You should look for your murderer and kidnapper elsewhere."

* * *

  
"You want to give me one good reason why I shouldn't charge you with attempted murder, Mr. Decker?" Cullen asked the other man as they sat in a conference room.

"You think I went after Seward out of vengeance?" Decker countered, the almost bald man glaring in frustration at everyone around him.

"Looks like vengeance," Cullen said bluntly, a statement that Booth had to agree with; even if Decker had 'convinced' himself that threatening Seward with a gun was a rational way to deal with the situation, it was still the same kind of excessive force he'd used when he'd abducted Holland Manners in order to find out if there was any way to access Quor-toth, and he _definitely_ knew what kind of mental state he'd been in at that time...

"KBC Systems hired people to kill my wife and kidnap my child," Decker responded, pain and desperation clear in his eyes. "Think rationally for a moment."

"That makes sense," Bones noted. "If KBC Systems is behind the kidnapping then Seward would be the one to call it off."

"A rational human being," Decker commented, before he turned to look at Bones. "How did you find yourself amongst these people?"

"Sir," Booth said [remembers how he would have done what Decker did once but has moved on since then], "we are trying to help."

"Excellent," Decker said, leaning over to more directly address him. "Hold your gun to Trent Seward's head and force him to let my son go."

"There's no compelling evidence that Trent Stewart was the man who ordered the kidnapping of your son," Cullen pointed out, clearly trying to restore some order to the current debate.

"I _personally_ calculated the penetration tolerances for the combat flack jackets," Decker said. "The company found my calculations to be 'excessively conservative'. Thirty soldiers died. Trent Seward will do _anything_ to prevent me from testifying. He or someone working for him kidnapped my child and killed my wife."

That was the essential problem with the need for valid evidence in these cases, when Booth thought about it; the evidence might all _point_ to KBC Systems, but there was still nothing in this case to _confirm_ that they were the ones responsible and it wasn't just some independent nut with a personal grudge...

"If you want to get Trent Seward," the other man in the room- Booth was fairly sure that he was involved with the prosecution in the current case, but he wouldn't like to swear to it; keeping track of things in these kind of cases could be hard sometimes- said, "go into that grand jury and tell them what you know."

"And the kidnappers will kill my boy," Decker said bluntly.

This was one of those times when Booth _really_ hated the fact that he didn't have the option of just killing the bad guys now that he was human; it was so much simpler to have that kind of view when you were dealing with soulless monsters...

"With all due respect for what you're going through emotionally, sir," Cullen said, sounding slightly uncomfortable as he said his piece- now that Booth thought about it, he thought he recalled reference to Cullen being a father himself-, "Mr. Weeks is not wrong."

"This is my son," Decker said, clearly fighting back tears as he spoke. "I love him, and if there's even a _slight_ chance that I can save his life by shutting up... then that's what I'll do…Shut the hell up."

Booth wasn't sure if it made him a better or worse father than Decker to know that he could have spoken in that situation if he thought it was serious enough, although the fact that Connor would have been old enough to accept _why_ he had to do something like that might have helped (He would _not_ think about someone doing this to him with _Parker_ )...

"And what about the soldiers?" Weeks asked in frustration.

"Look," Decker began, his self-control clearly slipping as his voice shook, "analytically, I understand that many lives outweigh the one, but I _cannot_ trade my son's life."

"Have you considered that, by not testifying, your wife will have died in vain?" Weeks protested.

"Shut it up, Weeks," Cullen said, looking in frustration at the other man. "If you people had protected Mr. Decker and his family properly, we wouldn't even be here."

"Let's go," Weeks said, rolling his eyes in a manner that failed to give the rest of the people in the room any kind of encouragement as he stood up, motioning for Decker to do the same before the analyst turned to look at Booth.

"The only way that I will testify is if I see you with my son," he said.

Booth wasn't sure what he'd done to merit Decker trusting him enough to give him that kind of role, but he already knew that he was going to have to do everything he could to fulfil that charge; even if he hadn't _personally_ thought in this kind of combat- regardless of what his records and memories said-, soldiers deserved the best quality protection they could be given, which meant that Decker _had_ to be available to testify in the upcoming case.

"Mr Decker," he said, standing up to address the other man properly as Decker's 'guards' took him to the door, "you and Donovan, you have a code word? Something to let him know that you sent me?"

"Paladin," Decker said at last. "Tell Donovan Paladin."

With that, Decker and Weeks left the room, leaving Bones and Cullen looking at him with a slight hint of amusement on their faces.

"Paladin," Cullen said reflectively as he stood up and adjusted his suit. "Defender of the faith, protector. Suits you, Booth."

Booth was just grateful that Cullen walked out of the room after that; after all the time he'd spent destroying symbols of faith with Darla as Angelus, he wasn't sure how he felt about being the protector of any kind of faith (Even his religion these days was mainly a moral compass for him rather than something he would _defend_ ; it was just easier to believe in God than explain why having faith in his friends- particularly Cordelia- was such a big deal to him).

"You know what?" Bones said, looking at him with the expression of contemplative amusement she always had when someone explained something related to emotions to her. "You tough guys are all very sentimental."

* * *

  
Later that night, with the case resolved and Donovan returned to his father- his hand would probably never be the same, but they could probably arrange for the finger or a variation of it to be reattached to help Donovan live some degree of a normal life-, Booth sat silently in his flat, studying the photographs in front of him.

As much as Bones might not understand how he could see good in the world despite his job, he'd witnessed enough miracles in his life- starting with the fact that he had even regained the ability to _care_ about other people in the first place and taking it from there- to know that sometimes things happened for a reason, even if that reason wasn't obvious.

Donovan might have been put in danger by his father's actions, but at the same time he'd given his father something to live _for_ in a world that didn't always give you anything but things you'd be willing to _die_ for; even if Bones couldn't understand that kind of distinction yet, it _was_ an important one.

Back when he'd been a vampire, he'd spent so long just existing in the world; Buffy and his friends at Angel Investigations had given him a purpose, but Connor's birth had given him a _reason_ to keep fighting even after he'd thought all the reasons he might use had ceased to apply to him (Buffy had moved on, Cordelia accepted him as he was even if he didn't Shanshu, things like that...).

And now...

As unconventional as his upbringing had been, Connor had generally done well for himself; the last time he'd seen his son, Connor had settled into a fairly comfortable life as a law student, championing victims on a different field of battle from his father, while also spending some nights out on the town to deal with any vampires or demons that might appear in his city, living a life outside of his original history as the son of the vampire with a soul.

It might not be the most conventional life or way of doing things, but it got the job done, and Connor was content; in the end, that was what really mattered.

It was what Bones wouldn't allow herself to see, really; the knowledge that, even if he died, some part of him would still be out there, continuing his legacy of protecting those who couldn't protect themselves...


	13. The Superhero in the Alley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference is made here to the _Angel_ novel "Impressions"; set around Season Three of _Angel_ , the novel featured Angel Investigations dealing with David, a photography student who saw Angel in action during his early days in Los Angeles and began to spend time posing as Angel for the thrill of it, eventually coming to the team's attention after his lack of supernatural knowledge resulted in a memorial stone imprinted with the last memories of a demon warrior releasing a wave of hostility across Los Angeles, culminating in David sacrificing himself to save the original Angel as he finally understood what it truly meant to be the vampire in question

As he walked into the room of their murder victim, Booth only needed to take a brief look at the walls to know that he'd need to make sure that he remembered everything he could about graphic novels and comic books; given the costume that Warren had been wearing when he was found, this kid's interest in comics must have played _some_ part in his death.

He might have only had limited knowledge of the genre when he'd been Angel- mostly based on some comments Gunn had made about particular issues that he'd read up on to satisfy his own curiosity-, but he'd found himself getting into the concept more after he'd become Booth and had his own secrets to keep, but even a casual interest was enough for him to know that the sheer amount of comics on Warren's walls wasn't exactly normal.

"This is Warren's room," Warren's mother said, facing away from him and Bones as she studied what Booth guessed was a picture of Warren when he was younger. "No one's been up here since the detective first looked it over."

"The news said there was hardly anything left of him," Warren's stepfather- Booth wondered what had happened to the original father, but knew that it wasn't his place to ask unless something came up which might suggest it was relevant to the investigation- added awkwardly, only for his wife to put down the photo that she'd been studying earlier and leave the room, faint sobs trailing behind her.

"Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to... _harm_ Warren in any way?" Booth asked, looking awkwardly at their latest' victim's stepfather from his position on the edge of Warren's bed; he wanted to project a more relaxed attitude to compliment Bones's professional analysis of their surroundings.

"He was always by himself," the man replied, with an awkward shrug. "No friends, no enemies; he would spend all his time up here with his comic books and toys. He was a lonely kid, died before he even had a life. I really thought he had just run away."

For a moment, the other man seemed about to leave as he walked towards the door while Booth stood up from the bed, only to turn around once he reached the doorway to look back at them.

"We tried," he said, looking earnestly at them, as though he wanted to assure them that he hadn't been a neglectful father. "Tried to get him out of this place into some kind of real life. I even got him a job at the bowling alley, but he just spent all of his money on this... stuff."

As the man walked out of the house, Booth moved him down a few pegs on his mental chart of suspects; in a case like this, the stepparent was the more obvious candidate for murdering the stepchild so they didn't have to 'share' their spouse with the memory of the child's parent, but that guy had definitely cared about Warren even if he'd had trouble showing it.

"Unbelievable..." he muttered, trying to take his mind off thoughts about past cases as he studied Warren's collection. "This is quite the collection of comic books."

"Hodgins said that the cellulose mass was a graphic novel," Bones added, as she studied the photographs on Warren's desk. "He sent it to Angela for analysis and recovery."

"Sweet," Booth noted, as he picked up one of Warren's comics for closer observation.

"Sweet?" Bones repeated in confusion.

"Ah, he has _Batman_ #127, featuring the Hammer of Thor," Booth said, indicating the comic in his hands; he'd been going through one of his 'better' periods back when this comic had come out- even if that mainly meant that he was spending time in human habitation rather than interacting with anybody; he'd remained underground for most of the war after the submarine incident, but he'd developed a taste for more comfortable accommodation after the war ended. "This is worth about three hundred bucks."

"Booth," Bones said, looking at him with a slight smile, "are you a nerd?"

"First of all, you mean geek, and no, I'm not, OK?" Booth countered. "It's quite normal for an American male to read comic books."

He might not have been the 'average' American male, but his time with Gunn and the memories he'd 'received' as Booth had given him enough information to form a fairly detailed knowledge of some prominent examples of the comic industry...

"I find it hard to believe you have anything in common with Warren Granger," Bones responded.

"Oh, you mean isolated with an inner secret life?" Booth replied; that might have applied to him in the past- albeit for different reasons than Warren's simple apparent shyness-, but he was _definitely_ past that stage of his existence now. "No, I'd say you were more like Warren."

Bones's response to that was interrupted as her phone vibrated, prompting her to glance at it as Booth walked over to glance at a plastic bag in a corner of Warren's room.

"Zack discovered some significant hairline peri fractures on the right and left ulnae," Bones said, as Booth noted the name on the bag; _Karma Comics_. "It's his arms."

"I _know_ ulna means forearm; I pay attention," Booth countered, putting the bag down as he glanced over at her. "I also know that perifracture means that the kid fought back, Bones."

"Small stature, a geek, and he fought back," Bones reflected, walking thoughtfully around the desk.

"Yeah, and he also got thrown from a roof," Booth countered (It was one reason that he hadn't liked that 'David' guy impersonating him; people trying to do stuff that they weren't physically capable of after being inspired by others just ended up getting into trouble).

"There's nothing but games here," Bones mused as she studied Warren's computer. "There's no journal, there's no documents, nothing personal. What did he do at his desk?" she continued, moving over to sit down in the chair as she ran her hand over the wood in front of her. "I mean there's a light, the rugs worn. He used this area for something; what was it?"

"Probably where he read his comic books," Booth suggested, just before Bones pulled a yellow piece of paper out of a drawer. Taking a pencil, she laid the paper out on the desk in front of her and rubbed it rapidly over the surface.

"I think Warren sat here, and wrote longhand with a ballpoint pen," she reflected, studying the text that her efforts were producing in a contemplative manner.

"That's pretty retro for a geek," Booth noted, leaning down to pick a comic up from the floor, taking in the image of the leather-clad man on the cover for only a moment before he dropped it on the desk in front of his partner. "At least we know where he got the idea for a costume; Citizen 14."

"A super hero," Bones concluded, the implications of Warren's choice of attire obvious to both of them.

* * *

  
"I don't like to judge an entire sub-culture," Bones commented as they drove away from the comic book store, their brief meeting with Warren's former associates still fresh in their minds, "but those people gave me the creeps."

"That's because they are creepy," Booth replied, feeling a need to elaborate as Bones looked back at him in a slightly critical manner. "What I mean is, those kids at the store are not a bunch of old good to you tutor you in math geeks. They were the uh, you know set the school on fire geeks. Dark nerds… Columbine nerds."

"Columbine?" Bones repeated, looking sceptically back at him. "You think Yasutani the Terrible is actually capable of murder?"

"I think they get high, you know," Booth clarified. "You know, they play these games, they lose their grip on reality, and, you know, they start to believe that they are these characters."

"You mean, like Warren out fighting crime?" Bones asked

 _If only it was just that simple_... Booth reflected grimly.

He knew that he was overreacting, but the memory of that screwy little 'cult' he'd run into back in Sunnydale when he, Xander and Willow were investigating that 'Ford' guy- he couldn't even remember what it had been called, but he did remember the guy; back at that stage of his life, most of the stuff that personally affected Buffy had a tendency to stick better than the rest- didn't exactly help him; _those_ nerds would have only hurt themselves with their personal 'delusions', and what these guys were doing had the possibility that they'd hurt others to further their own demented beliefs rather than just making a mistake that would hurt _themselves_...

"You know," he said, trying to take his mind off the events, "maybe Warren and that guy, the leader... Yasuhama… something ..."

"Yasutani the Terrible," Bones clarified (A part of Booth wondered if this had been how Buffy felt back when Giles had corrected her mispronunciation of demon's names back in the day, but seriously; how was _anyone_ meant to remember stuff like that?).

"Yeah, Yasutani the Terrible," he confirmed. "Maybe him and that guy they got into this uh, you know, magic fight and it became real."

A part of him wondered if that might have been literally possible, but he pushed it aside quickly; his knowledge of magic might not have been that detailed even when he was a vampire- he'd always preferred to let others do the spellwork while he focused on the tactical side of things-, but he _did_ know that you couldn't cast spells by _accident_ unless you already knew what you were doing, and anyone with that degree of skill would know not to lose control anyway...

"So, you're saying it wasn't Warren who was murdered, it was his character, Citizen Fourteen?" Bones asked uncertainly.

"They're so delusional they don't even know they have committed a crime," Booth muttered grimly.

"I'll get Hodgins to see if there was signs of drug use in Warren's hair," Bones replied after a moment's pause.

It wasn't much, but it was all that they could do right now, and Booth appreciated that she'd agreed to make the effort on what was admittedly a pretty slender hunch to begin with.

* * *

  
As he looked at Abigail- also known as 'Blue Minnow', for reasons he wasn't really sure about; how did people come _up_ with this kind of stuff?-, Booth wondered what they were going to learn about Warren compared to what they were going to learn about 'Citizen 14'; he tried not to judge people, but memories of fantasy lives just brought up too many recollections of that whole mess with David and what the guy had done, both directly and indirectly, before he'd ended up dead from his carelessness...

"Blue Minnow," he said at last, thoughts of the past pushed aside as he looked at the girl opposite him. "That's your alter ego."

"Abigail Zeeley is my alter ego," Abigail replied (Booth wondered how they reached a point where they legitimately thought that applied; he might have gone from Liam to Angel to Booth- obviously discounting his time as Angelus because that hadn't been _him_ where it really counted-, but

"Did you, Abigail, have a relationship with Warren Granger, or did the Blue Minnow have a relationship with Citizen 14?" Booth asked, staring back at the girl with the patience he'd mastered over his lifetime as Angel.

"Or any combination thereof?" Bones added, walking around his desk to stand in front of it.

"Neither," Abigail replied, as she continued to flick through Warren's now-restored comic book. "Warren had a girlfriend at Capital Bowl."

"What's the girlfriend's name, Abby?" Booth asked, already making a note to check out that bowling alley as their next stop; so far that place was the only location Warren seemed to go that wasn't comic-related...

"He never told us her name," Abigail replied, as she put down the comic to look directly at them. "It was just a... physical thing and it was almost over. Warren and I had a connection; he couldn't deny that. Before he disappeared he gave me his _entire_ Nue gaming collection, his favorite work besides his own."

"In his own work, he describes a woman known as the Opalescence," Bones put in, Booth indicating the relevant page in the comic to eliminate the possibility of a misunderstanding. "Do you believe that's supposed to be you?"

"What do you think?" Abigail responded, a slightly solemn tone to her voice that put Booth in mind of Buffy's tone when she'd come to see him that fateful Thanksgiving before the Mohra's attack; knowing one thing while _wishing_ for another...

"We think it's another girl entirely," Bones stated bluntly.

"Does that bother you?" Booth asked after a moment's silence (How was it he'd reached a situation where _he_ was the emotionally 'sensitive' one?).

"OK," Abigail said, sighing slightly, "maybe the others told you I'm _obsessed_ , I know, because they never got Warren like I did. He was right; they _are_ posers."

"But Warren wasn't?" Booth asked, trying to be delicate at the slight hint of tears in her voice and stance.

"Warren believed," Abigal replied (Booth didn't know if he should be worried about the way she said that; that kind of certainty was always unnerving). "He believed in truth, he believed in doing what was right. He _was_ Citizen Fourteen; Citizen Fourteen is real."

"Warren didn't fit in with the others?" Bones asked.

"I just _said_ ," Abigail said, her voice now sounding increasingly upset, "Warren was _better_. He was a really nice guy."

"Are you aware that, uh, Jeremy Kuznetsky and, uh, Kenneth Bert had police records?" Booth asked, glancing over the relevant papers before he handed them over to Abigail.

"Yeah," Abigail said dismissively. "It's nothing interesting, though; it's like vandalism and trespassing. You can't take them seriously."

"What, as criminals?" Bones asked.

"As anything," Abigail clarified (Booth made a mental note of that as a positive sign; Abigail had issues, but she recognised when something had value and when it didn't).

"OK, well, what would be... interesting... as a crime?" Bones asked.

"Something that took courage," Abigail replied simply. "Something that meant something."

"Like murder?" Booth asked.

"Yeah... like murder," Abigail replied, with a solemn nod as she stared at the files.

Booth wasn't sure how to feel about that; on the one hand, at least Abigail recognised that murder _was_ a big deal, but on the other hand, thinking that someone confronting a murderer was 'cool'- even if it wasn't explicitly stated- wasn't exactly reassuring.

* * *

  
As he walked into one of the side examination rooms of the lab, Booth was surprised to see Brennan sitting in front of a complicated-looking piece of machinery, blowing on it with no sign of doing anything else.

"What are you doing?" he asked, looking curiously at Bones.

"Breathing on the sample dissipates static electricity and makes it easier to cut," Bones replied, briefly glancing in his direction without moving her head, her tone the same tone he'd come to recognise her using when she was explaining something that she thought should be obvious.

"You seem nervous," Booth noted (He might not know her brilliantly yet, but he'd picked up how to read peoples' moods in less time than what they'd spent together back when he was Angelus).

"If I get this right," Bones clarified, as he walked around the table to sit down next to her, "I'll be able to tell you the age, sex, and race of Warren Granger's killer."

"Stew was the artist," Booth said, deciding that he might as well share his newly-discovered information now

"Really?" Bones asked, glancing back at him. "You think he killed Warren over artistic differences?"

"He also had a thing for Abby," Booth added.

"Wow," Bones whispered, her voice low.

"Yeah," Booth said, leaning back slightly in contemplation. "For a recluse, Warren Granger; he had his thumb in a lot of pies."

"You said before that Warren reminded you of me," Bones said, looking uncomfortably back at him. "You think I'm just like him that he hid from life by immersing himself in a fantasy world where he fought crime, and I do the same thing, only I don't have super powers. I... have science."

It was one of those rare moments where Booth wished that he could tell Bones about his past, not because he wanted her to see who _he_ 'really' was, but because he had another example from it that might have helped her; Fred might not have used the same type of science as Brennan to fight the good fight, but she'd still used science as her 'weapon of choice' more than anyone else he'd known back then.

"C'mon, Bones," he said, trying for the more obvious method of cheering her up, "you _do_ fight crime; it's not a fantasy. As far as any normal person is concerned, you do have super powers."

"You're just saying that to me," Bones replied, as she began to turn a wheel on the side of the machine (Most likely 'shaving' the bone like she said she'd do earlier).

"No," Booth replied immediately. "I don't do that."

He had to lie to her about so many things already; he wouldn't lie to her about _that_...

"Yes you do," Bones countered, as she continued her work. "You lied to Warren Granger's mother to make her feel better. That seems to be your superpower."

"Look," Booth said, as Bones moved the piece of bone she'd been studying to a large black bowl filled with of some kind of liquid with a pair of tweezers- he wondered how Bones would react if she knew what he'd once been capable of, but this wasn't the time to reveal something like that (He didn't know if there ever _would_ be a good time to do that, but this definitely wasn't it)-, "this piece of bone you're analyzing; how did it get lodged in Warren Granger's neck?"

"It was deposited by the same weapon that severed his spinal cord," Bones answered.

"Doesn't make it the killer's bone," Booth pointed out grimly (He hated to think about the possibility that there might be _another_ dead body involved in this mess, but he had to consider every option).

"You're thinking a separate murder victim?" Bones asked, looking uncertainly at him.

"Opalescence, the woman he loved?" Booth suggested; it was a long shot, but it was the best idea he had so far.

"I don't think she's dead," Bones corrected, as she moved the thin strip of bone on to a glass slide.

"Why?" Booth asked.

"This is an arm bone," Bones explained, looking contemplatively at him. "Has anyone we've seen on this case been favouring her arm?"

"Not that I noticed," Booth said.

"That's because you're not an anthropologist with super powers," Bones replied, smiling slightly at him as she placed the glass slide on the microscope beside the device she'd been using earlier.

"That's good," Booth said, smiling slightly back at her.

* * *

  
As he sat opposite Lucy McGruder in the interrogation room, passing Warren's file across the table for her to look at the photograph of the boy who'd died trying to help her, Booth wondered why it was that people _still_ tried to hold on to abusive relationships even in this day and age.

Women staying in this kind of relationship had at least made _some_ degree of sense to him back when he was Angelus- social options for women at that point were so limited that they practically _had_ to stay in the relationship out of a lack of options-, but these days, when women had more options, the idea that anyone would _choose_ to stay in a relationship with someone who hit them, and would attempted to excuse it because the other person could be 'funny' sometimes- or other such excuses- made _no_ sense to him...

"Warren knew what Ted did to you?" he asked, deciding to focus on the relevant issue rather than his own personal questions, the tearful blonde opposite him responding with a silent nod.

"Did you tell him?" Bones asked.

"I didn't have to; he saw one night," Lucy replied. "Ted hit me and Warren…Warren ran away."

"Why didn't you go to the police?" Bones asked.

"Because..." Lucy said, slightly hesitantly, before she began to recount another variation of the story he'd always heard from women in her situation in the past, "it's not all the time, and it's just when things go bad and he's under a lot of strain. Ted has a bad temper."

"Warren wanted to rescue you," Bones said, the slightly saddened expression on her face saying everything Booth needed to know about her own thoughts on Lucy's explanation.

"Oh my God..." Lucy said, her already-fragile control slipping as her voice began to break.

"He probably just wanted to intimidate your husband, stop him from attacking you," Booth added; he didn't want her to go away with an incorrect impression of the man who'd sacrificed himself in an effort to save her.

"Warren stabbed your husband in the arm with a bevel knife," Bones added.

"Ted took the knife away from Warren," Booth continued.

"It wouldn't have been hard," Brennan commented, evidently trying to find the right words for what she was about to say. "The boy was ill."

"After that," Booth said, deciding there was no point dragging this conversation out for longer than it already had been, "it's like you said; your husband has a bad temper."

As Lucy began to cry, Booth wondered if Warren would have considered this development worth his sacrifice.

A terminally ill boy dies, an abusive man got sent to prison, his wife was spared the abuse she would have been forced to experience until things possibly went too far one day in the future if things had gone too far...

Her future was uncertain, but that was the point; it was _her_ future, without any worries about what her husband might do to her.

Given Warren's own limited opportunities for any kind of future due to his illness, Booth thought that he would have considered it a fair trade-off for his actions.


	14. The Woman in the Garden

"Why did they call in the FBI to little Salvador?" Bones asked as Booth parked his SUV- he'd always prefer his old cars from Los Angeles for the style, but he couldn't deny that the SUV had excellent style and could take a fair amount of damage more than his old sets of wheels- near the red car where policemen were already arresting the driver.

"Well, you know," he said, responding to Bones's question as they both got out of the SUV, "the car's got Virginia plates, across state line and then there's a suspected gang member and then there's Rico to deal with... Look, Bones, do you really want to know?"

"No," Bones responded as they stepped under the yellow tape. "I was just using it as an excuse to make conversation and re-establish our connection."

"What?" Booth asked, looking over at her in confusion; maybe he was more used to 'hearing' Cordelia and Doyle's words after their impact on his social interaction, but he'd never heard someone describe that kind of social development that _clinically_...

"Well, I read a book about improving work relationships," Bones replied. "It's not fair to expect you to tell me everything."

"I appreciate the effort, Bones", Booth responded, trying to stop himself smiling slightly at the image of Bones _reading_ about how to interact with people; even at his worst days back when he'd been Angel, he'd trying to 'learn by doing' rather than taking advice from others (What his old teammates had 'offered' in their time together didn't entirely count; they'd done it more out of slight exasperation rather than a deliberate decision to help him)...

"It's like they recreated their country here," Bones said, looking around at the gathering of basic-looking shops surrounding the street, "right down to being terrified of the police."

"You know," Booth noted, "a lot of these people are undocumented; they get nervous around law enforcement."

As he walked up to the police gathered around the car, he pushed thoughts of how that could have applied to him in the past- it wasn't like he could have legally applied for any papers back in those old days when he'd been technically dead- and focused on the current issue. "What do we got?"

"Ran the stop sign," one of the officers present responded. "I pulled him over, he tried to run."

A cursory glance of the prisoner was all Booth needed to confirm his initial assessment.

"Whoa," he said, pulling down the collar of the man's jacket to expose the tattoo on the back of his neck; two 'Ms' on either side of a crucifix. "Look at this Mara Muerte tattoo; it's one of the most feared gangs in the territory. No wonder he was chauferring a dead body around, huh?"

Walking around the other man, he slightly grabbed the man's chin to glare in his face. "Couldn't you just join the boy's club, pal?"

"And I'm here because...?" Bones asked, as she stepped up to stand next to Booth, prompting him to release his grip on the other man's chin; that approach wasn't getting him anywhere.

"Police inspection of the vehicle, I found this," the original officer explained, leading them to the trunk of the car, revealing a blackened, decayed body wrapped in some kind of sack that Bones began to examine almost immediately after pulling on her gloves.

"Vertical brow ridge suggests female," she said said (How she could do this kind of thing Booth had no idea, but he _definitely_ admired it), "recently dug up, looks like..."

She stood back up and indicated the prisoner. "Could you hold his hands up, please? We should analyse the dirt on his hands and compare it to the dirt on the shovel and on the remains."

"Where was she buried?" Booth asked, turning his attention to the immediate matter as he addressed the other man, the prisoner's hands still cuffed behind his back as Bones looked them over. When he met with no response, Bones said what he presumed was the same question in Spanish, followed by another question, but neither query met with any kind of response.

"Great," Booth groaned. "Now he's ignoring us in two languages..."

"Where is the nearest cemetery?" Bones asked, turning to the officer.

"The closest one I know about is Holy Rood, but that's a good ten miles from here," the officer replied apologetically.

Bones turned to try and address the crowd around them, but the only response to her questions was for the crowd to disperse without any sign that they were bothered about the anthropologist's efforts to find answers.

"Maybe your Spanish is a little rusty?" Booth suggested, in an attempt to lighten the mood that even he knew was weak.

"They come from a place where getting involved gets you killed-" Bones began, only for further conversation to be halted when somebody in a nearby car stuck a gun out of the window and began firing. Moving instinctively, Booth grabbed Bones and hurried her along towards the rear end of the car, bullets striking the car just behind them as he drew his own gun to try and fight back...

Then his eyes fell on the prisoner, running down the street with his hands in front of him- he must have worked them under his body while the officers were distracted by the gunshots-, and he had more immediate matters to deal with (Particularly after he'd confirmed that Bones hadn't been harmed by the shooting either).

"Hey!" he yelled, running after the handcuffed man as he ran down a nearby alley. "Hey!"

As the man turned down another, smaller alley to the right of the first one, Booth mentally cursed the loss of his vampire speed; the ability to go out in the sunlight was an obvious benefit of being human, but he had to go to so much effort to maintain even a fraction of the physical strength that had once been his natural 'right', he was sometimes amazed he didn't have more accidents (A decade or so of adjustment wasn't always enough to counter over two centuries' knowledge of what he could do)...

"Don't make me shoot you!" he yelled as the running man moved to climb over a fence in his path, hauling himself up the wire-frame barrier. For a moment, as Booth grabbed the other man by the ankle, he thought that he had a shot at keeping a hold of his prisoner, but then the man's shoe came off in his hand. Momentarily off-balance at the loss of resistance from the other man, Booth staggered back, regaining his balance just in time to see the handcuffed man land with a hard impact on the hood of a car on the other side before rolling off and resuming his original pace.

 _Damnit!_ Booth fumed, staring in exasperation at the rapidly-fading sight of his suspect retreating down the street.

If he'd still been Angel- and the weather was right, obviously-, he'd have been over the fence and after that guy with everything he had; as it was, Seeley Booth had lost too much time and distance to keep up with the guy before he got somewhere that would make it practically impossible to track his route...

* * *

  
As he sat in the interrogation opposite the gang lord of one of the main street gangs in the area, Booth wondered how it was that humans could make things almost more complicated gang-wise then vampires; at least with vampires power was normally given to the oldest vamp present- that time the Anointed One took over the Order of Aurelius in Sunnydale after the Master's death being the sole exception-, but there were so many ways that an ambitiously-minded human could take control in a gang that he'd lost track of them ages ago...

"Miguel Villeda, warlord of the Venganza Rojas street gang," he said, trying to sound more impressed than he was (Even when he was only human now, it took a lot to intimidate someone who'd been face-to-face with the likes of Master, Dracula, and the Beast). "According to this, you are... one fierce, fierce guy."

"Well," Villeda replied, a smug expression on his face, "it didn't stop your guys from picking me up."

"They tell you why?" Booth countered.

"Someone took a shot at some, um, Mara Muertes Puma-" Villeda replied dismissively.

"Not a shot," Booth interjected grimly "A couple of dozen shots, a drive by. Hardly anyone is stupid enough to shoot at those guys anymore; your name came up."

"It wasn't my people," Villeda replied dismissively. "So are you going to charge me with something or let me go?"

"Extortion, drugs, assault, attempted murder?" Booth countered, flipping briefly through the file in front of him before his attention turned back to the other man in front of him. "I could hold you for a while if you want to play that game."

Gang warfare was one of those areas where he definitely missed the vampire way of doing things; generally, unless the other vampire was _significantly_ more powerful than you were, any vampire was perfectly within their rights to kill the other guy and just take over without any questions, but dealing with human gangs had several more complicated 'rules' that he had to keep in mind no matter how much some of them might deserve to die...

"What's your problem, man?" Villeda asked dismissively.

"What's my problem?" Booth repeated, leaning over the table to glare more directly at Villeda. "My problem is that somebody shot at me- shot at me _and_ my partner-, plus, you know, a bad guy got away, so I'm a little cranky about the whole thing."

"Hmm," Villeda said, leaning back over the table in response. "Mira cavacho. I don't really scare that way; you know, the whole 'in your face staring' thing."

That was one part of his old life as Angelus where Booth was never sure if he should be grateful for its absence or not; the fact that he could no longer 'intimidate' people into giving him what he wanted to know was inconvenient at times, but at least it gave him the comfort of knowing that he wasn't his demon any more...

"Give me a chance, man," he said, concealing his own internal reflection with a slight smirk. "I'm just getting started."

"Mmm," Villeda responded non-committedly. "So, somebody shot at you, huh?"

"That's right," Booth replied.

"Think about it," Villeda countered, not even giving Booth a hint of a smile or frown that would provide some indication how he felt about the current topic. "When was the last time when you heard of a drive by where no one got hit?"

"Innocent bystanders, mostly," Booth retorted grimly. "It's not like you always hit what you aim at."

"Think," Villeda said, pointing to his forehead, "just for a couple of seconds, about _why_ the guy never got hit."

Booth was almost ashamed that he didn't realise what Villeda had pointed out to him on his own; how often had he attempted a similar scam to get out of trouble back when he was Angel and dealing with people who didn't know he was a vampire?

"Ah, yeah, you see," Villeda said, smiling broadly at him in a condescending manner that Booth wished he could take off the guy's face without getting done for 'police brutality' (He might not like to use his memories of inflicting pain, but that didn't mean they weren't tempting at times). "You got it now?"

"You're saying that Mara Muerte did a drive-by on their own guy?" Booth asked; he got where this was going, but he wanted to be sure he didn't miss something...

"A drive-by happens, yeah, and you all hit the deck," Villeda said, tapping his fingers mockingly on the table. "And the gang-banger makes a run for it."

It certainly fit the facts he had available to him so far, Booth had to admit; nobody got hurt because nobody was _meant_ to get hurt, and the entire thing had just been set up to give the gang member a chance to get out...

* * *

  
"I called shotgun," Hodgins protested as he sat in the back of the SUV, staring in frustration at Booth as he and Bones sat in the front of the car. "What does it mean to a society when the niceties are no longer observed?"

"OK, look, we've got two bodies, alright; one unaccounted for," Booth said, deliberately ignoring Hodgins's protests (The man could complain more than Xander Harris at his worst at times). "We've been shot at, and now we know there is a gang member walking around a US senator's place. Any theories?"

He almost couldn't believe it when both Bones and Hodgins shook their heads; how could two of the smartest people he'd ever met have _this_ little interest in the world outside their labs and experiments?

"Oh, c'mon, guys," he said, trying to prompt more thought out of them. "Let's think of it as a puzzle; there's a missing piece."

"I like puzzles," Bones said (Booth sometimes wondered if she listened to _anything_ he said and just picked out the more random words to respond to in order to get on his nerves). "I find them relaxing; I just finished the anatomy lesson by Rembrandt."

"You're kidding, right?" Booth asked, looking over at her slightly incredulously; reading something like that reminded him of some of the times Wesley had done translations because he hadn't had anything else to do...

"What do you find relaxing?" Bones asked, looking curiously at him.

"I... restore vintage cars," Booth replied, going for the hobby that seemed most 'Booth-like' based on the image he tried to create; he did enjoy the chance to work on old cars just for the sake of it, rather than having to work on his old cars to repair damage they'd sustained when he had to use them as an improvised weapon of some sort against his current demonic opponent, but he still enjoyed the occasional sketch when he had the chance...

"I know what I find relaxing," Hodgins put in, leaning forward with a smile.

"Everybody finds what you find relaxing, relaxing," Booth pointed out.

"Senator Corman is a big supporter of business leaders in Central America," Hodgins continued (Booth wondered if he'd registered the insult and was ignoring it or was clarifying that the current topic was actually what he'd been thinking about). "That means supporting repressive regimes that use death squads to silence any opposition from the working people which are the same people who flee to the states."

"OK, that's great," Booth said, trying to get the group off that particular topic; the last thing he wanted was getting dragged into another of Hodgins' political rants. "That's good. OK, let's focus; that's good, 'cause now we have a link between Corman and the Salvadorians."

"Now you think the senator killed two people?" Bones asked uncertainly.

"Nah," Booth replied, waving a dismissive hand. "I just think we got another piece of the puzzle, that's all."

Whether it would be a relevant piece was another matter, but every little helped; sometimes you didn't know what fit into the pattern until you saw what the end result had turned out to be.

* * *

  
"Jose's sister hated him," Ortez said as he sat on the opposite of the table from Booth and Bones, his more cultured appearance nevertheless disguising the same fundamental nature as Villeda had displayed earlier; a casual arrogant certainty that he was going to come through this mess all right simply because he was the one in it.

"Hated him, why?" Booth asked.

"She didn't approve of his associations," Ortez said simply.

"You mean his associations, like the leader of one of the most murderous street gangs in the country?" Bones asked (Booth sometimes wondered if that was why he liked working with her; she could say the kind of things that he _wanted_ to say but couldn't due to his new responsibilities as an FBI agent).

"Look," Booth said, trying to stick to his responsibilities as an agent to ask the relevant questions, "if she hated Jose so much, why was he moving her body?"

"When the burial site was threatened, he wanted to move it to a better place, and his father," Ortez said. "Real family guy, you know."

Comments like that from a man like this just made Booth sick; he doubted this bastard _remotely_ understood the _real_ concept of family beyond what was necessary for him to function in his 'profession' and keep the rest of his gang out of jail...

"I'm not the leader of the whole gang," Ortez added, leaning forward to address Bones with a mockingly solemn expression. "Just the DC chapter."

"You shot at us so Jose could have a chance to get away," Booth said, refusing to rise to the implied insult Ortez had tried to score by talking with Brennan like that in front of him.

"The Mara Muerte takes care of its own," Ortez stated. "Even a throwaway like Jose."

"Can I ask you something?" Bones cut in.

"Go ahead," Ortez said

"Jose's all beaten up, so he won't tell us anything," she said, leaning over the table, "but you, you don't even ask for a lawyer but you hardly stop talking."

"Bones," Booth said, hoping that the warning tone would encourage her to stop before she went too far.

"Hey, I'm the boss, lady, OK?" Ortez said. "Jose's a sobrenato. What is also true is the man is not as smart as me."

"You intimidate him into silence, but you can walk in here to the FBI, say whatever you want, and walk away like you own the place," Bones said grimly

"That's right," Ortez smiled, with the same nonchalant arrogance that uncomfortably reminded Booth of his long-deceased grandsire; the casual confidence that he could do and say whatever he wanted because he possessed so much power and such a dangerous reputation that he was virtually untouchable.

"Look," he said, trying to take his mind off that twisted face he'd first seen so many long years ago, as he stood up, trying to regain some kind of control of the current mess, "all I need to know is who would have the guts to kill his sister?"

"Who cares, man?" Ortez said dismissively.

"C'mon, Ortez," Booth countered. "The sister of the Mara Muerte? It's the most feared gang in the city."

"She wasn't my sister, man," Ortez replied (One area where the Master had differed from this guy; for all that he'd been a vampire, he'd at least shown concern for _some_ of his minions, even if he'd disposed of the Three fairly easily after their first failure to bring him Buffy from what Darla had told him during their brief reunion in Sunnydale while she was trying to win him back).

"It had to be somebody else in the gang, somebody more important than Jose," Bones suggested.

"You know what, lady?" Ortez said, smiling and pointing briefly at his head. "You think too much. Maybe you need a man like me, get your mind off of things, you know what I'm saying? I can be your thorns of adorn."

Booth wasn't sure if it was the words or the brief 'air-kiss' that provoked his partner, but it was enough to make Bones walk out of the room in a rage (Much to his relief; if she'd stayed here much longer, Ortez may have done something that would make Booth react in a manner he _knew_ he'd regret later...).

"Look," Ortez said, as though the previous few seconds hadn't happened, "I don't know who killed Jose's sister, but I'll tell you what; because I like you so much, I find out who did it, I'll kill them."

Booth wasn't sure if it was the subsequent laugh or the fact that he had to let the guy out of the building after this interview that made him feel in a particularly bad mood at this point, but whichever it was, he spent the next few moments sitting silently in the interrogation room, fuming inwardly at the way the interview had gone before he felt like he had regained enough control to get to his feet and leave the room.

* * *

  
As he sat in the car opposite the alley, Booth wondered why he was doing this; he could have gone with the offer to use FBI resources to make Ortez call off the hit on Bones, rather than deciding to take care of it himself.

He knew that he could do it, of course, but the part of himself that he'd need to draw on in order to make a convincing impression on a guy like Ortez was a far darker part than he was usually comfortable using for _any_ situation, particularly when it was so much closer to the surface of who _he_ was these days.

As much as he acknowledged it hadn't been the case, back when he'd been Angel it had been easier to 'pass the buck' for some of his darker moments to the part of Angelus that had always been in the back of his mind; moments like this just forced him to recognise that Angelus had been a deeper part of him in a manner that he didn't entirely feel comfortable with...

Then he saw Ortez walking down the street and into a side alley, and all thought vanished; as he left his car, ran up to the other man, turned him around, and slammed him against the wall of a nearby door, it was all about action.

"What are you, crazy?" Ortez asked, glaring back at him. "This is my neighbourhood-!"

"You put a hit out on my partner?" Booth countered.

"She's not FBI, so-" Ortez began, before Booth cut him off with a rapid punch to the face, the fist quickly relocating itself to grip Ortez by the throat as he pulled out his gun with his other hand, placing it under the gang leader's chin.

"I never said anything about FBI," he said, glaring coldly at Ortez. "She's my partner, and if anything happens to her, I will find you and I will kill you; I won't think twice."

The last part might have been an exaggeration, but it wasn't much of one; even when he'd been Angel, he'd always been willing to kill humans if he was absolutely _certain_ he had to do it...

"Come here," he said, noting Ortez's eyes flicking around him in an apparent search for an escape, his now-cocked gun between Ortez's lips, "look at my eyes; look at my _face_. If anything happens to her, I will kill you. This is between you and me. What nobody sees, nobody knows. You've got nothing to prove; you understand?"

The lack of response prompted him to slightly shove his gun further into his opponent's mouth. "You _understand_?"

Ortez's response was somewhat hard to make out, but the general attitude of confirmation was enough for him.

"Yeah, I thought so," Booth said, his old nonchalance settling in with the threat removed. "Now, if you don't mind, I'll leave first, 'cause I've got somewhere I have to be."

With that, he removed his gun from Ortez's mouth, uncocked it, turned around, and walked away, pausing only briefly to hold the gun against the centre of the gang leader's forehead just to make sure he got the point.

It might not be the _best_ way to make the other guy understand what he had come to say, but with people like Ortez, it was the only language they truly understood.


	15. The Man on the Fairway

As he studied the bone fragment that Bones was holding up in front of herself, the other two fragments lying on the lighted table beside them, Booth had to wonder what it said about him that he was practically unable to get away from long-dead bodies; either he was fighting them or he was helping people work out how they'd died,

"You got it, or do you want me to explain again?" she asked, a teasing smile on her face.

"No, I got it, OK," Booth said (He almost missed Wesley and Fred at times like this; the squints always seemed to enjoy talking 'down' to him to varying degrees, but at least they'd treated him as more of an equal even if he hadn't understood some of what they were talking about). "The plane goes down, Kablooey, there's an extra body on board which you really don't care about because you're more interested in these bone-" he tried not to be offended when Bones slapped his hand away as he pointed at one of the items in question "-fragments that you found on the ground."

"Exactly," Bones replied, as she placed the fragment she'd been holding up earlier back on the table.

"Is this all you got?" he asked, studying the objects in slight surprise

"So far, a piece of skull, a chunk of vertebrae, part of a femur," Bones replied.

"Not much to go on," Booth noted with a slight smile; he was reminded of Fred or Willow, back when they'd had some sudden revelation without realising they were missing something to make it fit.

"These fragments come from a person who was hacked-" Bones informed him with an almost disturbing smile.

"Hacked to little bits," Booth commented, his mind grimly flashing back to some of the times he'd been forced to resort to those kind of methods to eliminate the demons he'd been fighting.

"No, medium-sized bits," Bones corrected, placing particular emphasis on her words as she studied him. "I'm not sure how it turned into little bits yet."

"OK, and I'm here, why?" Booth asked, rolling his eyes in confusion; he appreciated the effort, but as a federal employee his time wasn't exactly his own any more...

"Dismemberment, little bits; it's a murder," Bones clarified.

"Well, FBI doesn't have jurisdiction at a golf course," Booth pointed out (It was one of the main disadvantages of being an official agent; at least as Angel he had relative freedom to go where he wanted when following up a lead, even if that was mainly because nobody else _wanted_ to tackle the kind of stuff he dealt with...).

"Well, who does?" Bones asked.

"I don't know; try the PGA," Booth said dismissively, unable to stop a sudden smile as Bones looked awkwardly down at the table.

"Ah-ha," he said, grinning at her. "You know, you've done a couple of cases without me, and you miss me."

"Zack misses you, not me," Bones corrected him.

"Zack and I don't even talk," Booth responded (He didn't _hate_ the guy- he reminded him slightly of a male, equally-antisocial-but-slightly-saner version of Fred in her early days with the group too much for Booth to hate him-, but he was still a bit difficult to talk to at times).

"He seems to think it's a male bonding ritual," Bones clarified, looking slightly critically at him.

"Maybe he's right?" he interjected before she could go any further.

"No he's not," Bones said.

"Could be," he countered, trying to defend himself

"You told him that so you wouldn't have to talk to him," Bones retorted.

"Well, it was nicer than shooting him," Booth retaliated; it was an exaggeration of how he'd react, of course, but it should hopefully get his point across anyway.

"Mmm," Bones said, before her attention returned to the bones in front of her. "Goodman has ordered me to investigate the other extra body."

"Well, then, you better get on that," Booth said. "Next time you, you know, miss me, pick up the phone, call me; we'll do lunch or something."

"I do not miss you!" Bones retorted automatically.

"Yeah, you miss me, c'mon," Booth said, the earlier grin back on his face.

"I do not miss you!" Bones repeated.

"Say it," Booth said again.

He knew that he was overdoing this, but it had been so long since someone _genuinely_ missed him he felt that he was entitled to enjoy the moment; he'd had friends back in the army and a few close colleagues in the Bureau, but any meeting with his army buddies was complicated by the fact that at least half his memories of most of them weren't entirely real, whereas he'd experienced everything the squints remembered them experiencing for _real_...

"Doctor Brennan, Agent Booth," a voice said, prompting the two to look around and see a security guard standing at the door. "You have a visitor."

Even as Bones walked out of the lab, Booth couldn't stop the slight smile at even the implication that she'd missed him; after so long living a life where most of his friendships were based on fake memories, it was nice to know that he could bond with people based on _real_ memories as well.

* * *

  
As he sat in Wong Fu's, looking at Jesse Kane as he sat opposite them, Booth wondered if it was slightly hypocritical to be judging this guy just because he wasn't a professional investigator; he'd never had an official licence back when he'd run his investigations as Angel, and it hadn't slowed _him_ down...

Then again, he had always operated in an area where there _was_ no official training available- Riley's paramilitary demon-hunting organisation aside, the governments were still generally unwilling to acknowledge the existence of demons, and those guys tended to operate on a principle of hunting for larger 'groups' while he'd focused on more dangerous individual demons-; the fact that this guy was doing something that _could_ be investigated by professionally-trained individuals made a bit of a difference.

"My expertise in missing person's investigations derives from one thing," Kane explained, passing a newspaper article to Bones. "My search for my father. He went missing five years ago during a trip to his cottage in Virginia Beach."

"What makes you think these bone fragments come from your father?" Bones asked, barely pausing as Booth took the offered article to study it himself.

"Alright," Booth said, indicating the article with his knife, "you know, there is a question of National security here that is in my jurisdiction; he's not supposed to know about the Chinese."

"My investigations lead me to conclude that my father was murdered in the area and his body disposed," Kane continued, as though he'd never been interrupted.

"What did the police say?" Bones asked.

"They gave up four years ago," Kane clarified.

"Because there was no evidence of foul play," Booth said, handing the newspaper article back to the other man before he turned his attention back to his food.

"The investigation was bungled," Kane retorted, apparently unconcerned about the fact that he was right in front of a representative of the people he was accusing of incompetence. "The city police didn't have the manpower, the state troopers said it was a federal matter, and you guys suggested a private investigator."

"It was not _bungled_ , OK, because there was no evidence of foul play" Booth countered, looking over at Bones (Kane probably wouldn't listen to him any more than he'd listened to people earlier, but he could at least make sure Bones got the point he was trying to make). "It's a common story, OK? A guy goes in for a pack of cigarettes and ends up renting out snorkeling gear in Guam."

A part of him knew that there _could_ be other explanations, but given that most of those involved supernatural elements that he didn't exactly feel it was his place to reveal at this time- particularly given his lack of evidence to support any claim he might make and no idea what might have been in the area at this time-, there was no point in mentioning that possibility right now.

"He doesn't know what it's like to lose a parent," Kane said, his gaze fixed on Bones as though Booth had never spoken. "You do."

Booth almost couldn't believe he'd just heard that.

Spike had been tactless, but that was based out of a desire to cause pain, and even Bones's main 'errors' were just inspired by simple social ignorance rather than anything else; the fact that this guy would bring up something so deeply personal to Bones just to make a point (And not even an accurate one at that; just because he never got along with his parents in _either_ of his childhood memories, and just because he knew what had happened to them, didn't mean their loss didn't affect him...).

"You want to back down a jot there, buddy?" he said, putting down his cutlery to point a critical finger at the other man.

"How do you know about that?" Bones asked, her tone for a moment reminding him of the same blunt scientist he'd met almost a year ago.

"No offence, Doctor Brennan, but you're a writer, you're a well-known scientist, it's out there," Kane clarified. "Plus, you're one of us."

"One of us?" Bones repeated.

"People whose loved ones have simply vanished," Kane clarified. "In your case, both parents."

"OK, how do you know about the Chinese?" Booth asked, promptly sticking his hand in front of Bones's face when Kane continued to stare at him (He squashed down the part of himself that told him that had been motivated by jealousy; he'd accomplished his goal of drawing attention back to himself, even if Bones moved his hand away from her face pretty quickly). "Do _not_ look at Doctor Brennan, okay? Whether you like it or not, this is an issue between you and the FBI."

"If body parts are found in roughly the area where my father disappeared, I'm going to know about it," Kane clarified, looking at Booth as though he was talking about something that would automatically be available to anyone. "Radio chatter, the internet, the local law enforcement, that's all I'm prepared to tell you."

With that, he turned back to Bones, dismissing with Booth with frustrating ease once again. "Do you mind if I ask you how many bone fragments you found?"

"Yes, I do," Bones replied. "I don't discuss ongoing investigations."

"She doesn't discuss ongoing investigations," Booth repeated, as he began to pour some sauce over his food.

"Fair enough, Doctor Brennan," Kane said, before he turned to place his hand on a box of files on the technically-empty chair opposite Bones. "These are my notes from the last five years, every lead, every clue; every person I have ever talked with is here."

"And why would Doctor Brennan care about that?" Booth asked, before he began to chew on the next bit of his stake.

"Because it will at least give her a candidate to eliminate," Kane pointed out, with a frustratingly condescending smile on his face as he pointed that out (Had he dealt with this much crap when people thought he was a private detective, or had things just been easier than because he started out with the impression that he was going to believe them from the beginning?).

"He's got a point," Bones said, much to Booth's slight frustration; he hated it when people stuck their nose into this kind of thing and actually had a _valid_ point.

"My father's medical records, pictures, last known whereabouts, even a connection to the golf course," Kane continued, picking up a photograph of what Booth assumed was a younger Kane and his father. "Also my phone number, but don't worry; if I don't hear from you, you'll hear from me."

With that, he stood up and walked out of the restaurant, leaving Booth to stare silently at his partner.

"Wow," Booth said, whistling in exasperation as he glanced at the files their 'guest' had left behind. "Pushy."

"Well," Bones said, as she leaned on the table to address him, "maybe he discovered that being pushy is how you get cops to pay attention."

"What are you hawking at me for?" Booth asked, trying to ignore the intensity of her stare as she looked at him; he _really_ hated it when people lumped him in with the rest of a group just because some people made mistakes.

"The Chinese, the plane crash, that's geo-politics," Bones said. "This is murder. Will you help?"

"Well, you know," Booth said after a moment's contemplation, "I guess if you're uh, really asking me, I guess I could uh you know fudge it with my boss to make it look like it was attached to the Chinese plane crash thing."

It wasn't a promise, but the smile Bones gave him in response was encouraging on its own; it was always nice to know that people trusted him with this kind of thing.

* * *

  
"Ray Sparks was in jail when your father disappeared," Booth said as he stood in his office, Kane sitting in front of him while Bones sat in the opposite chair, trying not to think about the way that Bones was even subconsciously trying to 'relate' to this guy.

He was trying to get Bones's reasons for spending so much time on Kane's case- her 'thing' about helping people find the answers she didn't have herself-, but the fact remained that this guy had just barged into their case with absolutely nothing but a guess about who the victim was and expected them to crack it.

"He might have acted as a go-between, put Karen in touch with the hit man," Kane countered, apparently unconcerned about the relatively minimal information suggesting that the theory he'd just proposed was possible.

"One of the things that you lecture about," Booth responded, glaring pointedly at him, "is that the simplest theory usually turns out to be true."

"Usually, not always," Kane said in response (Booth couldn't believe this guy could so easily dismiss everything he'd argued about for ages when it didn't fit his views; was it so hard to _see_ how obsessive he was getting about this?).

"What's the simplest theory in this case?" Bones asked, looking back at him inquiringly.

"Disowned son realises that his father may remarry, loses his inheritance..." Booth began, his eyes flicking to Kane as he spoke.

"Booth, are you accusing Jesse of murdering his own father for money?" Bones asked (If she reacted that way to somebody _killing_ someone in their family, he wondered how she'd react to learning about some of the stuff he'd seen back as Angel; Magnus Bryce trying to sacrifice Virginia to that demon was _definitely_ not an encouraging example of familial relationships).

"Did you ever hear the Menendez brothers?" Booth began

"I came to _you_ about the bone shards saying it might be dad-" Kane pointed out indignantly.

"Hey, look," Booth interjected- after the way the guy had insulted him and the agency he now worked for, he felt that he was entitled to say his piece on this topic-, "your father is declared dead, you get your inheritance before Karen Anderson spends it all."

Kane said nothing in response to the accusation, but the slight tension as he folded his arms hinted that something Booth said had made some kind of impact.

"Well," Booth said- he didn't entirely _believe_ this theory, but felt it was worth testing Kane's thoughts on the idea anyway-, "you don't seem too upset about the accusation."

"Agent Booth," Kane countered, looking coldly back at him, "for four years I have been making enemies with law enforcement; attacking me is a pretty typical response."

"Booth," Bones asked, leaning over the chair's arm-rest to better address him, "is this one of the times when you just poke and prod to get reactions?"

"Listen, Bones, we have to treat him like a suspect," Booth said, turning away from Kane as he looked back at her. "He is _not_ a member of the team."

He acknowledged that the comment sounded somewhat prejudiced, but he couldn't help it; he worked best when he had a certain number of people available to him that he _knew_ he could trust, and he didn't like just letting some guy into that category just because he _might_ have some information that could help them in this case (Particularly not when the guy was almost certainly obsessed to an almost unhealthy degree with the subject of his investigative efforts).

"Look," Kane said, relaxing his arms as he looked at Bones, "I'm like you; I need the truth."

The brief gleam of tears in his partner's eyes was more than enough for Booth to know that Kane had just crossed

"I have to get back to the lab," she said, standing up and hurrying out of the office, leaving Booth to glare at Kane.

He didn't trust himself to actually _say_ anything at this point after what the guy in front of him had done to his partner, but the stare he was directly at the amateur investigator seemed to be making his point for him.

* * *

  
As he sat in Wong Fu's that night, the squints chatting away in a side booth while Booth filled in the last few bits of paperwork required, he wondered how he should mark this case down in his personal mental records; he'd uncovered one murder that had gone unsolved and even unreported before he stepped in, but Max Kane's final fate- the reason they'd paid so much attention to that case in particular- was still a mystery...

Then again, as much as he hated to sound insensitive, Kane had just creeped him out a bit; speaking from personal experience after the mess he'd nearly made of his life in his single-minded 'pursuit' of Darla- as well as less direct examples, such as Spike's former relationship with Drusilla or Holtz's attempts to kill him-, dedicating yourself to a single goal based around a single individual just got you nothing but cutting you off from everything that had made you start on that path in the first place.

It was probably too much to hope for that the guy would take this as a hint to cut back on his investigations and stop getting his hopes up, but he had to have hope; if his life had taught him anything, it was that anyone could change if given the chance.

The sound of footsteps prompted him to glance over at the door, but he just turned back to the paperwork when he saw that it was Bones; if she wanted to talk to him or the squints, it was her call, and he wasn't going to pressure her after everything that Kane had been doing over the last few days...

"How did Jesse take it?" he asked, turning to look at her as her footsteps clearly indicated that she was approaching him.

"Like an orphan," Bones replied as she sat down, before she noted that he was still looking at her. "What?"

"That's just- that's a little poetic for you," Booth replied, chuckling slightly at her; it somehow put him in mind of how people would have reacted back in Sunnydale if Willow had suddenly stopped babbling when stressed.

"I didn't mean it that way," Bones replied, prompting Booth to simply smile briefly before he turned around to pick up his drink.

"I want to ask you another favour," Bones added.

"Oh jeeze; _another_ favour..." Booth groaned in a deliberately exaggerated manner as he took a sip of his drink.

"I wonder if you wouldn't mind taking a look at this," Bones finished, sliding the file she'd been holding over to him.

"The file on your parents?" Booth asked, noting the name on the top of the file in surprise.

Given how long it had been since she'd even _mentioned_ her parents to him, the fact that she was just bringing it up like this...

"Yeah, OK," he said, trying not to show how much the idea trusted him; that she was willing to give him a shot at her greatest personal mystery...

"Do you want to think about?" Bones asked. "It's a pretty big favour."

"You'd do it for me," Booth replied, trying not to think too much about the fact that she'd _never_ be in a position to do that to him even as she confirmed his assessment- he knew what had happened to _all_ of his parents, and he didn't even _want_ to be reminded of what had happened to his 'Liam' parents given Angelus's role in those events-, and instead focusing on how it felt to know that she trusted him this much.

"I'm proud you asked, Temperance," he said, smiling at her, knowing even before he said it that this was a moment to acknowledge the humanity rather than any other part of her; the Bones he'd met originally would _never_ have had the nerve to open herself up to someone about something like this...

"Ah, Doctor Brennan," Zack said, the young 'squint' walking up behind them and breaking the moment. "Angela wants to know if we should order anything for you."

"No, I'm not staying," Bones replied with a brief shake of her head. "Thanks, Zack."

"Guess we caught another one, right?" Zack said, turning to look at Booth with an awkward smile that Booth didn't need to see to recognise. "All for one and one for all."

"I'll take a look at this, see what they didn't give you, and I'll get back to you, OK?" Booth asked, looking simply back at Bones as he chewed on a couple of nuts; he didn't want to be rude, but the earlier he discouraged Zack's awkward attempts to bond the better it would be for all concerned parties.

"You're back to ignoring Zack?" Bones said to him in a low voice as Zack returned to his table with a slight smile.

"Alright, look," Booth said, "I know you don't approve, but, you know, it works for us, it worked for him, so..."

"Yeah, I get it," Bones responded, nodding briefly, "and... it's kind of sweet."

"Hey, you know," Booth said, shrugging dismissively, "your people are my people."

"What; I have people?" Bones asked.

Booth didn't respond verbally, but the dawning enlightenment on Bones's face as she took in the meaning of that statement was all he needed to see to know that she understood.

"Hey..." Bones said, smiling slightly at the thought. "I have people."

It was the utter honesty of that smile that won him over at that moment, Booth would reflect later; after everything she'd lost in her life before now, the simple knowledge that she had 'people' was something that she'd never really had before now.

As she walked out of the restaurant, Booth opened the file before him, but he only took a brief glance at the photo of her parents before he found his attention diverted to the other photograph in the file; a fifteen-year-old Temperance Brennan, her head tilted to one side and a finger on her chin as she looked contemplatively at something off-camera, a slight smile on her face as the sun shone down on her...

It was so different from the picture he'd once had of Buffy at that age- that long-ago-lost black-and-white image of the Slayer who'd given him a reason to exist, casually leaning against a wall in a simple white top with a slight smile on her face-, but somehow, the casual attitude she demonstrated in this image made the picture mean more to him than that one had; it was as though he had been given a chance to see Temperance Brennan at a normal moment of the day, rather than just when she was posing for a photograph and trying to look presentable.

There was something very... sweet about the chance to see his partner in such a vulnerable moment, before everything had started to go wrong in her life; it was nice to see a glimpse of the girl she'd been the way he'd managed to see Buffy thanks to Whistler.


	16. Two Bodies in the Lab

As he walked into the Jeffersonian with Kenton beside him, Booth wondered how long it would be before he felt capable of ignoring the disturbing implications of the appearance of the man who was currently walking alongside him; even as much as he respected Kenton's abilities as an agent, there was always that part of him that felt anxious about working with a guy who looked _that_ much like Marcus Hamilton.

Even the knowledge that it was probably just a random fluke of genetics rather than anything else didn't stop Booth remembering how it had felt when Hamilton had so nonchalantly nearly beaten him to death during his last few moments as a vampire before Los Angeles had been sent to Hell; even after the pain he'd experienced when he'd jumped off that building before he realised what had happened to him, there was something about the nearly effortless manner that Hamilton had almost killed him that always left him feeling uncomfortable.

He'd technically taken more damage from the Beast, but at least the Beast had _looked_ like it could take him in a fight; Hamilton had seemed like he was more bark than bite in that suit of his, and yet he'd come close to killing him more than once in their fight...

Still, that was in the past, and Hamilton was long since dead; this was the present, and, as Kenton regularly made clear with his chosen attire of leather jackets, he was _not_ Hamilton.

As he walked into the Jeffersonian, Booth smiled slightly at the sight of the squints standing around the main table- they might need lives, but there was something kind of nice about seeing people that committed to their jobs-, his interest being piqued as the conversation they were having reached his ears.

"...not a date, it's a meal," Bones was saying.

"With a man?" Hodgins asked, glancing up from the clipboard he was studying.

"Did you meet him on the website I told you about?" Angela asked, just as Bones swiped his passcard over the lab's electronic 'key' system.

"You're dating online?" Booth asked, trying to stop his mind flashing back to what he'd heard about Willow's close call with Moloch- just because he'd been only loosely affiliated with the gang at that time didn't mean he didn't keep tabs on their activities-; he doubted any demons would be trying something like that with Bones.

"Well," Bones replied dismissively as she turned away from the central table to walk towards him, "it's a practical way of objectively examining a potential partner without all the game play."

"That comes later if it works out," Angela added, not even looking in his direction as she held out her hand to Kenton. "Hi, I'm Angela."

"Special Agent Jamie Kenton," Kenton replied with a brief nod. "Hi, Doctor Brennan."

"Hey," Bones responded, the two agents exchanging nods with the forensic anthropologist.

"You two know each other?" Angela asked, looking curiously between them.

"Well, I was at the Bureau when Booth took his coffee cup," Bones clarified (Booth couldn't stop a slight laugh at that comment; Bones always had the most interesting way of remembering people). "Apparently, they're both the world's greatest FBI agents."

"That's right," Booth said; he tried to make up for his comfort about Kenton's appearance by focusing on his positive skills as an agent, but even he acknowledged that the description Bones had just given was an exaggeration. "Kenton is working the Cugeni case; he's one of the original investigators. This is Brennan's brain trust."

"Your victim is over here," Bones said, ignoring his 'brain trust' comment as she led them over to the table

"So," Booth asked, "what if your computer date's a psycho?"

"Only about a billion people date on-line," Angela put in.

"Yeah, I have," Hodgins added (Booth wondered if he should take that as a sign to worry about that; at least with what he'd heard about Willow, 'Malcolm' had _initiated_ contact with her rather than Willow looking for someone to date herself).

"You know," he said, leaning against a computer as he looked at Bones with a smile, "whatever happened to seeing someone across a crowded room, eyes meeting, that old black magic gets you in its spell?"

"There's no such thing as magic," Bones said dismissively.

"Oh, there's magic," Booth replied; he'd let her assume that he was talking about the more metaphorical magic rather than the literal stuff he was actually discussing.

"Are you here for a reason?" Bones asked, getting back to the essential point of the current visit like always. "Because Agent Kenton is handling this..."

"We have some remains to look at," Booth clarified.

"I'm already looking at them," Bones responded.

"Nope, no, not the Cugeni case; Kenton will baby-sit him," Booth said, indicating where Kenton was showing Hodgins something on his phone. "These are fresh."

"Well, I was told that our friend in the cement shoes took precedence-" Bones began.

"That was before we found someone tortured and ripped apart by dogs," Booth interjected.

As he took in Bones's reaction to the idea of someone doing that to someone, he ignored the part of himself that wondered if it would turn out to be something else; while some demons _could_ cause the kind of damage he'd seen, they were also so uncontrollable that he'd already know if anything like that was active in Washington, so dogs were the more likely candidate...

He _really_ needed to stop thinking of demons whenever he faced the more brutal monsters he ran into in this new career; he should have learned from Wolfram & Hart that you didn't need to be demonic to be a monster.

* * *

  
"Romano didn't give us anything, so I should probably be back at the lab," Bones said as they walked into her apartment (Booth wondered if she was even _capable_ of 'turning off' when dealing with a case; even whatever social conversations he had with her tended to focus on case-related matters).

"No, your squints can handle it," he said, trying not to show too much awe at the design of her apartment- white walls mixed in with simple stonework, a couple of pillars, and some comfy-looking chairs; the effect created an interesting blend of old and modern that put him in mind of her approach to work- as he spoke. "You haven't slept in over a day, all right? You need to get some rest; I'll sleep on the couch."

"You think you're staying here with me?" Bones asked, looking uncertainly at him.

"Yeah," Booth said, turning his attention back to the apartment (This wasn't an issue she legitimately _could_ argue about, so he wouldn't give her a reason to start one). "Nice place by the way, Bones."

"No, I'm- I'm _locked_ in here, Booth," Bones protested, ignoring his compliment. "I'll be fine."

"OK, look," Booth said, ignoring Bones's attempts to dismiss him as he took in the surrounding area, "I want you to stay away from your windows too, okay? A sniper has a clear shot from any of these surrounding buildings."

"I could have just stayed at the lab," Bones said, throwing her bag into a nearby chair in resignation. "The security is tight there."

"Then you would have worked, you would have gotten tired, and you would have been more vulnerable when you _did_ go out; trust me, this is the best, all right?" Booth said, before he clapped his hands together and turned his attention to less work-related matters. "So, where's the TV?"

"I had one, but it broke," Bones answered, shrugging slightly awkwardly. "I'm... I mostly just read and listen to music."

"So, let's listen to some music, huh?" Booth said, trying to conceal his own satisfaction at this turn of events; he'd gotten into TV more when he became human, but he still enjoyed a chance to kick back with something interesting to listen to at times (One obvious disadvantage of living on the streets was that it left you rather out of touch with popular culture; he hadn't seen any reason to get a TV when Whistler had first come to him, and there'd always been something more immediate for him to do as Angel before he became Booth).

"What do we got, Bones?" he said, as he began to glance over the CD holders near her stereo. "Wow, world music; there's a shock... Tibetan throat singers? Rock on, Bones."

"That's mostly for work, so..." Bones began, as Booth began to browse the other CD holder (The content of that holder was nice, but he'd had enough of Tibet and the like when he went on that spiritual retreat to cope with Buffy's death).

"Kayne West, Captain Power..." he began, before he paused with a slight smile at the next group of CDs. "Look at this, lots of jazz; I'd have thought all that free-form stuff would be a little bit too unpredictable for you."

"No, I love it," Bones replied with a slight smile. "The artist has to live within a set tonal structure and trust his own instincts to find his way out of an infinite maze of musical possibilities, and the great ones do..."

Her voice trailed off as Booth smiled at her.

"What?" she asked.

"Oh, nothing," Booth replied, letting out an awkward laugh at her query; there were definitely some occasions where no amount of lessons would help you react appropriately (Not that actual experience could cover everything either, in his experience). "I just... I just never expected that you would... you know..."

"That I would love music?" Bones finished, smiling at him. "Well, I don't usually get to talk about it, but since you brought it up, I thought..."

"No, hey, I didn't mean to make you feel self-conscious or-" Booth began, before his eyes fell on a particular CD lying in front of her stereo and picked it up. "Whoa, what's this?"

"What is it?" Bones asked, as he quickly positioned himself in between her and the stereo as he slipped the CD in question into the machine.

"Booth," Bones asked, just before the music started to blare from the speakers, the familiar beat of _Hot Blooded_ filling the previously near-silent apartment.

"Uh... how did that get there?" Bones asked, as Booth started strumming on an air guitar (One advantage of him not being Angel any more; nobody started panicking when he stopped brooding and started acting 'wild and wacky', as Fred might have said).

"Oh, please," Booth said, smiling at her awkward attempt at rejection, " _everybody_ loves Foreigner; _Hot Blooded_? Talk about a guilty pleasure!"

He might have preferred Manilow back in his 'outsider' phase- the years in the twentieth century when he'd felt somewhat more capable of interacting with other human beings than others, despite his own guilt about what he'd done without his soul-, but this song had always appealed to a certain part of him that just liked to let _rip_.

As Bones smiled at him in a slightly incredulous manner, he started singing along to the current song- keeping his voice low to avoid revealing just how bad he was at this kind of thing; no point revealing any flaws he didn't have to-, letting himself go wild in a way that he'd never really been able to do in the past, resisting the urge to just grin when he saw Bones start jumping, dancing and singing along with him; this was a _very_ unique bonding opportunity that he wasn't going to pass up...

Then the sound of Bones's phone ringing prompted her to head over to answer the call, leaving Booth to tone down the dancing to limit the possibility that he'd end up distracting Bones as she spoke. For a few moments, he was content to allow himself to focus on the moment and ignore whatever his partner was saying- he was still alert for surrounding threats; that was what mattered-, but his initial high began to die down as he took in some of the pertinent details of Brennan's side of the conversation.

Of all the people who were going to call, it had to be her 'almost-date', didn't it...?

And why did that _bother_ him so much?

"Wait," he said, looking awkwardly at her as she ended the call with brief reassurances that she'd get in touch with the other man later, "I hope you didn't think-"

"No," Bones replied.

"No, 'cause I... I wouldn't want to, uh, you know, ruin things for you- ruin anything," Booth replied (God, what was _wrong_ with him; he sounded like Xander Harris at his most moronic!).

"Not a problem," Bones said, shaking her head in a dismissive manner.

"Hey, you got a soda, some juice?" Booth asked after a moment's uncertain silence; it wasn't great, but it was the best way to break the temporary silence that was coming to him right now.

"Yeah, in my fridge," Bones replied, smiling along with him at the ridiculousness of the awkwardness that had suddenly descended on them. "I'll get it-"

"No, no, no," Booth interjected, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her before he began to walk towards the kitchen area himself. "You know what? I'm... I'm not your guest. You don't have to wait on me; I'll get it."

When he thought back on these events after the situation had been resolved, Booth was never entirely clear on what precisely had been said in those last few moments, apart from a confirmation from Bones that she was fine and a follow-up comment that there were glasses in a nearby cupboard. He was just reaching out to get a glass from the cupboard while opening the fridge when he suddenly felt something ram into him with what felt like the same amount of force that he'd felt when Illyria threw him out of the science department and he'd hit the pavement, followed by the uncomfortable feeling of things becoming incredibly warm...

* * *

  
As he lay in his hospital bed, his limbs feeling stiff and awkward, Booth had to admit that there were definitely times when he would have preferred to remain a vampire; he might not be burned by sunlight any more, but that didn't mean he couldn't still wish that he'd retained his advanced healing after he was restored to human form by the Powers rather than the Partners. Even with the memory of the aches and pains he'd taken as a vampire helping him develop a comparatively superior ability to deal with pain compared to the average human, that didn't change the fact that it _sucked_ when he had to take so long to get back to his fighting peak when he'd spent over two centuries living in a world where all he had to do was wait a few hours and get some blood before he was ready to go back to action...

"Kenton is on his way over," he said, turning his attention back to the present as he looked at Bones where she sat in a chair next to his bed, still occasionally glancing at the file in her lap. "You have to promise me that you are going to stay with him."

"I will," Bones responded.

"Did they gather all the evidence from the explosion?" he asked (Anything to take his mind off his current condition right now _had_ to be a good thing).

"Yes," his partner confirmed.

"You're sure?" Booth repeated (It wasn't that he doubted Bones, but she'd never done this kind of thing _totally_ without him).

"Yes, Booth," Bones replied, a slightly exasperated edge to her voice. "I was there. They were very thorough and I was very annoying."

 _Damnit_... Booth sighed, leaning back in his bed as he stared at the ceiling.

He _hated_ being so useless for so long; apart from that mess when Spike had tried to heal Drusilla, it had never taken him more than a day or two to get back into action when he was Angel, and here he was with no choice but to wait for _weeks_ to get back to normal...

"I'm sorry, Booth," Bones said. "It should be me lying in that bed."

"I'm fine," Booth said (He wasn't going to let Bones start blaming herself for something she _clearly_ couldn't control; he might do that a lot for his crimes as Angelus, but there was no reason for _her_ to do the same). "You know, I... I don't even know if... if I have to stay here, you know?"

"You got blown up," Bones countered, looking at him as though he'd said that two plus two was five.

"I've been worse," Booth said simply (He just knew that Bones would never believe how _much_ worse he'd been in the past; his condition after that first fight with the Beast was probably the most punishment he'd ever taken, but it wasn't like she'd believe that he got stabbed in the neck and could still be walking about without even a scar).

"You have burns, lacerations, two broken ribs, green stick fracture of the clavicle..." Bones began.

"OK," Booth interrupted- it was bad enough having to heal from that kind of punishment without hearing the full details of what was wrong with him-, "I got blown up."

Trying to take his mind off that issue, Booth reached out for one of the small tubs of pudding in front of him- lack of supernatural healing sucked, but at least his sense of taste was improved-, only to find that he couldn't quite stretch his arm far enough; the damn ribs made it hard to really move his arm that far...

"Can you..." he began, looking awkwardly at Bones (He _hated_ it when he was injured). "Can you hand me one of the puddings?"

Without making any additional comments about his physical state, Bones simply reached over and picked up one of the puddings in question while he gradually inched his fingers over to pick up a spoon, getting it into his hands just in time for her to hand him the small tub.

"Oh, man..." he said, sitting back in his bed as he tried to find a more comfortable position. "Thanks, Bones. Look at that."

"You know," Bones said, picking up a file that had been lying beside her and opening it, "on your X-rays, there's a history of multiple fractures on your feet consistent with beating. It's a common method of torture in the Middle East, beating the soles of the feet with pipes or hoses."

"Yeah, I know," Booth said, as he tried to move the spoon to his mouth (He was just grateful that 'resetting' his body to human had also repaired any of the damage he'd sustained as Angel; some of those injuries would _not_ have beeneasy to explain away).

"And there are indications of injuries sustained while you were shielding someone-" Bones continued

"How the Hell can you tell something like that?" Booth interrupted, looking at her in surprise; he recalled Wes mentioning something once about there being a difference between how the body reacted when it hit something and when something hit it that could help determine the difference between being beaten up and having an accident, but how could she know what he was doing at the time he was injured based on _how_ he was injured?

"The scarring shows that the rib cage spread in such a way that-" Bones began to explain.

"Yeah, OK," Booth said, his mind quickly going back over his memories of Booth before he found the incident she must have been talking about, grateful that it was at least one of his 'real' memories from that time (The more time he spent with Bones, the more he hated the lies he had to tell her about his past). "A buddy of mine, he lost his weapon and I, uh... I tried... He didn't make it."

Bones simply sat in silence as she looked at him, but the sympathy in her eyes would have been the equivalent of tears in another woman.

"You know," he said, trying to push this sudden bleakness aside as he smiled at her, "you shouldn't be looking at my X-rays."

"Sorry," Bones replied, in a tone that could have been referring to either topic, before a slight knocking drew their attention to the door of the room just as Kenton walked into it.

"Hey," the other agent said.

"Yeah," Booth replied.

"You look like crap," Kenton said, his hands in his pockets as he studied Booth.

"Yeah, well," Booth said, indicating his current food with his spoon, "a little bit more of this pudding and I'll be just fine, you know; just stick with her."

"If you want me to," Kenton confirmed.

"Don't you think I should be consulted?" Bones asked, looking between the two agents.

"No," Booth said, before he looked back at Kenton. "Keep her close."

If he couldn't do the job himself, at least it was an agent whose skills he trusted in his place...

* * *

  
As Hodgins's small car pulled up outside the warehouse- why a man worth as much as Hodgins drove such a small car Booth just didn't get; even if he didn't want his wealth to be known to the general staff of the institute, he could afford a nicer car than _this_ -, Booth could only focus on his own rage at what he'd just deduced about Kenton to distract himself from the pain he was still feeling; all the times he'd put his issues about the guy's appearance aside, and he'd been selling the entire Bureau out to the Ramona crime family...

He couldn't believe that it had taken Hodgins to help him realise what he'd been missing; after the year or so he'd spent running Wolfram & Hart, he had to realise that the trouble with working in a large company was that it was _really_ hard to know for sure that you could trust _all_ of your co-workers.

Maybe he'd just assumed on some level that he'd had more issues with Kenton looking like Hamilton than he actually did, and pushed down his subconscious observations of Kenton's real behaviour- believing that he was exaggerating the other guy's flaws because his doppelganger had nearly beaten him to death once- to the point that he hadn't realised what was _really_ going on with that guy until he came across something that he _couldn't_ ignore; the change in methodology of their apparently prime suspect, coupled with the fact that they hadn't found Hollings yet, was just too many twists to be a total coincidence...

As he jumped out of the car, Booth fought the urge to succumb to his injuries as another agent walked over to the car, the rest of the team arming themselves in preparation to enter the warehouse.

"We used thermal imagery to see what activity there was inside the buildings," the agent explained. "We found a crack house, a couple of squatters; just about to move in here next-"

"No, no, no," Booth said, fighting the pain as he tried to focus his thoughts. "He hears noise... you know, he could freak out and kill her; we've got to be careful."

"There's no we, Booth-" the other agent began.

"Yeah, I'm going in with you," he countered; he got Bones into this mess, and he'd be _damned_ if he wasn't going to get her out of it.

"You can barely stand-" the other agent tried to protest.

"I _said_ I'm going with you," Booth said (If he could intimidate Connor into not fighting after spending three months at the bottom of the ocean with only a basic amount of blood in his system and face-to-face with a guy who had been raised to hate him for virtually his entire _life_ , he could _definitely_ intimidate this guy when all he had was a few damaged bones). "Give me my gun."

After a moment's hesitation, the other man pulled the requested item out of his pocket and passed it to Booth, subsequently calling over for a bulletproof vest that Booth quickly established he couldn't put on.

"Alright, you know what?" he said, tossing the vest over to Hodgins (He hated to admit it, but he'd feel strange going into action without a 'squint' after so long working with Bones). "You can come too; just put that on, and you stay back."

"I can do that," Hodgins said as he shrugged the vest on (It wasn't exactly normal strategy, but after the role Hodgins had played in helping him work out the truth about the events of the last few days, Booth felt that he deserved to be 'in at the kill').

As the other agents pulled out their guns and entered the building, Booth and Hodgins followed a team into an area filled with various boxes and a chain-link fence on one side- Booth briefly noted the obvious 'crack heads' on the other side but ignored them; they weren't who he was here for and none of them were vampires, so it wasn't something he could worry about right now-, progressing from that area along a stone-walled corridor, trying to limit the amount of times his ribs made him wince.

"Maybe you shouldn't have had all that pudding," Hodgins said after a particularly long pause, only to be met with a stare from Booth before they continued walking, heading through another door into what looked like an abandoned storeroom. Just as Hodgins and the agent who'd accompanied them was about to leave the room, a brief glance down revealed something Booth immediately recognised as Bones's keyring, Hodgins picking them up for him as he hurried down the corridor as quickly as he could...

Then he glanced through a hole in a nearby wall and saw Kenton standing over Bones, his gun raised in one hand as she stared up at him, hands bound and tied to a hook, a rag in her mouth and terror in her eyes, and pain was replaced by instinct; she was in danger, and he _had_ to help her.

A quick shot to the shoulder was all that it took to put Kenton down for the count, but after that, as far as Booth was concerned, he was the agency's problem; _his_ only priority right now was Bones.

"Alright," he gasped, removing the gag from the anthropologist's mouth before he turned his attention to the rope around her wrists. "OK, all right; hold on..."

With no other way to free the anthropologist from her bonds, he

[ducks under the hook between her arms to lift her off, falling down onto his rear as Bones hugs him, her wrists still bound]

"It's OK," Booth said, barely aware of what he was saying as he held her in his arms, faint sobs coming from the woman who'd never shown anything less than total control of any situation she was in. "I'm right here... it's over... it's alright..."

He wasn't sure how long he sat there muttering reassuring words before Bones loosened her grip and sat back to look at him, but he didn't even think about relaxing her grip until he heard her laugh; if she was well enough to find anything even remotely worth laughing about, she was past the worst of it.

"How did you get out of the hospital?" she asked, her voice in his ear somehow making the last hour or so of pain worthwhile.

"Hodgins gave me a ride," Booth replied. "Maybe... maybe you could give me a ride back though, huh?"

The nod she gave him in response was the last thing Booth saw before he leant forward, pain once again his dominant companion as the surge of adrenaline wore off; he was _really_ going to be sore tomorrow...

But he'd done it.

He might have failed to even gather the _will_ to save Buffy on his own the first time she'd faced a serious threat- looking back he supposed that the problem had been his own inexperience with emotional commitment; it had just been easier to step back when things reached a point where he'd have to get _seriously_ emotionally invested in the current situation, particularly when he and Buffy had already concluded that they were never going to be more than what they were-, but now, the first time that Bones had been in real, direct danger- as opposed to someone threatening her and him catching the people intending harm out before they could do anything themselves- from someone they were hunting down...

He'd managed to save her.

* * *

  
As he lay in the hospital bed once again, Booth briefly wondered if the room upgrade he'd received was because of his injuries or because somebody at the agency was grateful he'd saved such a 'valuable asset', but right now he didn't care; the only thing that _really_ mattered right now was the only other person in the room, clad in a black dress with only a small bandage on her head to show any sign of what she'd nearly been throw.

"Kenton is telling us everything," he said, the smile at the thought of this latest breakthrough only slightly marred by what had been lost to get it. "I mean, I guess he figures there's nothing to hide; he's finished anyway."

"Better late than never, huh?" Bones said

"Yeah, I guess," Booth said, pausing for a moment before he decided to continue; lack of communication had cost him too many relationships at times for him to want to do that any more than he had to. "You know, I let you down, Bones. I'm sorry."

"You saved my life," Bones said; clearly, as far as she was concerned, that was all that mattered.

"Yeah but you know, I shouldn't..." Booth began, before he just shook his head in exasperation at himself. "It shouldn't have gone down like that."

"What a pair," Bones said, her phone ringing just as Booth looked over at her with a smile.

"Brennan," she said as she picked up the phone. "Um, I'm leaving right now. David," she explained, in response to Booth's inquiring look as she ended the call. "We're finally having our dinner."

"Well, I figured you didn't dress up for me," Booth said (At least that was a more _sensible_ explanation for the dress than a hospital visit with a guy in his shape...).

"You sure you don't... want anything?" Bones asked as she stood up.

"Nah, I'll be fine," Booth said. "I'm just going to, you know, flip around the TV here."

"OK," Bones said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Yeah, have a good night," Booth said, smiling back at her (At least they'd pretty much confirmed that David _hadn't_ been involved in the shooting the previous night...).

"Thanks," Bones replied, before she turned to walk out of the room, leaving Booth to change the channel from what seemed to be the news- burning buildings; why couldn't people develop more flame-retardant stuff?-, another couple of news channels, and a food advert, before he settled on what looked like a fifties romance.

It wasn't much, but at least it was a lot simpler than the mess he'd been dealing with lately...

The faint sound of footsteps prompted him to look up in time to take in the surprising sight of Bones walking back into the room, less than a minute after she'd left it with an unreadable look on her face.

"I... rescheduled," she said, indicating the bandage on her forehead. "My... my head still hurts."

"Well," Booth replied, deciding to accept her excuse without pushing his luck by asking for more information, "you can watch TV if you'd like."

"Sure," Bones replied, moving around to sit down next to him, her arm stretching out to support her as she leant on his bed-

"Bones, arm," Booth muttered, prompting her to shift the offending appendage as she sat back in the chair. "Thanks."

It was a minor thing in the grand scheme, he knew, but he couldn't help but appreciate it; faced with a choice between a date with a guy she apparently liked- no matter how strange he found the whole 'internet dating' thing- and a night with a guy in hospital, she'd chosen him over 'David'.

They'd not even been really working together for a year yet- their first case didn't count as it had been a casual encounter that had apparently ended without any apparent potential for future development-, and he _already_ meant enough to her for her to sacrifice a date for no other purpose than to spend time with him.

It wasn't a major gesture by any stretch of the imagination, but it was... nice... to know he meant that much to her.


	17. The Woman in the Tunnel

As he was lowered down into the sewer tunnels that were the location of his latest crime scene, the various other law enforcement personnel that had been assembled to assist them waiting below as Zack and Bones hung around alongside him- why was it those kind of comments _always_ made him think of Xander or Gunn?-, Booth wondered if this was one of those occasions where his superiors knowing about the past experience he'd gathered as Angel would have given him more leeway than he currently possessed; if they knew that he'd survived in these kind of sewers on his own for so many years, maybe they'd stop trying to give him more people...

Of course, on the other hand, he acknowledged that his experience at keeping _himself_ alive in these situations didn't necessarily translate into an ability to keep _other people_ alive in the same situation, but he felt that he was allowed to wonder about that kind of thing.

"Where are we?" Bones asked, as she examined the surrounding tunnels with her torch.

"Apparently," Booth replied, trying to take his mind off the discomfort of travelling this way- when he was Angel he could have done this kind of thing with a few jumps-, "this was an access shaft to an underwater aqueduct which has never been activated."

"No," Bones clarified as Zack suddenly came down to join them. "I mean, where are we geographically?"

"Oh, somewhere beneath Wisconsin and Massachusetts Avenue near the National Cathedral," Booth replied, making a mental note to talk with Bones about clarification in future; that kind of comment could be easily misinterpreted.

"How far down?" Zack asked, the torch on his head making him look slightly strange as he almost seemed to be trying to hang close to Booth for reassurance. "We seem very far down."

"Oh, about sixty feet or so," Booth replied nonchalantly.

"Is there any other way?" Zack asked as he glanced upwards.

"It's a giant maze down here, but this was the fastest way to get to the body," Booth clarified (He wasn't exactly comfortable either; he wasn't exactly _afraid_ of heights, but incidents like when the Beast and Illyria had kicked him out of windows didn't exactly make him feel comfortable with them).

"I've done plenty of climbing," Bones put in with a regular tone that was probably meant to be reassuring. "These lines have low tolerances that are more than adequate."

"What about shock tolerance?" Zack put in. "The rope jerks, pounds-feet of kinetic energy increases and snap- we fall to our deaths."

"OK," Booth cut in- he hated thinking about stuff like that; if it had hurt when Illyria threw him out of that window when they first met he _really_ didn't want to imagine how he'd cope with something like that now that he was alive- after a sudden jerk on the ropes brought them to a momentary halt. "I say we just drop the chatter."

After a few moments of silent descent, he was almost relieved to find himself with the other officers already at the bottom of the shaft, looking at a badly decayed body covered in rats that were already feeding on the rotting flesh.

"Two city workers found it," one of the officers guarding the body explained, indicating the small pile that looked more like the remains of an unfinished dinner party than a human body, lights set up to shine directly on it. "DC public works are under federal jurisdiction, so this is your party."

"Oh," Booth said, trying not to remember his own experience with rats- nearly getting eaten by them while still conscious was _not_ a nice experience- as he indicated the shaft above the body. "Any idea what's at the top of that shaft?"

"Utility tunnel for accessing steam pipes," the other man replied.

"May I borrow your gun?" Bones put in, holding a hand out to Booth as she stared at the body.

"Why do you want my gun?" Booth asked; for a moment, a part of him was almost nostalgic for the old days when people could always bring their own weapons during business.

"I'm not going to shoot anyone, I promise," Bones replied.

"It's not a hammer or anything..." Booth muttered; it might be petty, but he just felt so much more vulnerable without a gun now that he didn't have his superhuman strength to fall back on...

"We've been working together for months, Booth," Bones said, looking at him in slight exasperation. "A little trust would be nice."

 _Trust_...

That was the tricky thing, really; Booth wasn't ashamed to say that he trusted Bones with his life right now, but he just couldn't trust her with his _secret_...

"Careful," he said as he passed his gun over to her; if he couldn't tell her the truth about himself, he could at least give her the benefit of the doubt in something like this.

"Here," Bones responded, passing her torch to him. "Hold this."

With that, she turned around and fired a few quick shots at the body, each bullet striking one of the rats, before she turned around to hand his gun back to him. "Now they'll eat each other and leave our remains alone."

"You know," Booth said as he put the gun back in its holster, "I do have to file a report with the review board each time I discharge a round from my weapon?" (Another difference from when he was an independent operative, although in all fairness he'd always been more 'hack-and-slash' back when he'd been Angel; even when the situation had called for long-range combat, he'd found it a lot easier to retrieve arrows than keep a record of bullets fired, and Wesley was the team marksman later on anyway).

"Pictures, Zack," Bones said, ignoring Booth's comment as she crouched down beside the body. "The rats scattered the remains, so give me a five-meter radius. The velocity of the fall shattered her body on impact. Tibia's and fibula's broken below the knees, vertebrae compressed and shattered..."

"Her?" Booth interjected, unable to believe that Brennan could establish something like that so quickly.

"Yeah," Bones confirmed as she looked awkwardly back at him. "I just hope that she was dead before the rats got to her."

"Oh God," Booth muttered, trying to take his mind off that particular train of thought. "Any idea how long she's been down here?"

"We should have some answers when Hodgins analyzes the bugs, but rats can strip a body in days," Bones commented.

"Shirt, pants, but no jacket or shoes," Booth muttered, trying to focus on the clothing rather than the flesh in front of him. "No way rats can carry that off..."

"Excuse me!" Bones suddenly called out, standing up as her torch focused on something behind Booth. "Sir? Sir!"

"Hey, what the Hell?" Booth yelled, as Bones suddenly began to run down the path towards what Booth could now see seemed to be a man, the figure in question turning to run away even as she approached him. "Bones! Easy! Bones, what the hell are you doing? Bones!"

As he caught up with her after a few moments' running, he was relieved to see that she was unharmed; he didn't know where the local vamp population was, but if there wasn't _something_ unpleasant down here he'd be very surprised...

"You don't just go running after guys into the dark," he said, trying to focus on the more human-based dangers she could have encountered.

"He didn't need any light," Bones noted, once again ignoring Booth's comments that had nothing to do with the current case. "He knew exactly where he was going."

"Yeah, that's creepy," Booth noted (He was just grateful that he'd heard breathing from the other guy while he was running; some vampires might feign breath to blend in better with humans- like he had back when he'd been living in Sunnydale-, but this guy had no reason to do that and so was probably human).

"He lives down here," Bones finished, a reflective tone in her voice that Booth didn't need to think too much about to realise the implications of it.

* * *

  
"You know," Harold said as he sat opposite Booth in the interrogation room- Booth tried not to think too much about the lawyer alongside his suspect; he got the necessity of the other man's presence, but he had a goal to achieve right now and he was just going to focus on that-, "I find scrap metal. That's all. That's why I go deep."

"You don't have to say anything you don't want to, Mr. Overmeyer," the lawyer said (Booth wasn't sure if he should be touched at the fact that someone would put this much effort into a pro bono case after all his negative experiences with Wolfram & Hart or just annoyed at how difficult the other guy made things).

"You're not here because you scavenge," Booth said, one foot on the chair as he leant on the desk to stare at Harold; he didn't entirely get Harold's authority down in those tunnels, but he wasn't able to use that here. "You know that."

"I-It's too bright in here!" Harold said, giving no indication that he would respond to Booth's statement as his head constantly moved around to take in his surroundings. "Too- too bright in here!"

"I know you have a distinguished military record, Harold," Booth continued; maybe establishing some common ground that he would be expected to possess would help him get through to this guy. "10th Special Forces Group. You know, I was with the Rangers."

"What, so, you... you gonna tell me, uh, "Harold, I know what you been through. I been there, too, you know? I know how you ended up how you ended up"," Harold asked, waving his hands slightly as he squinted at Booth. "You telling me that?"

"Yeah," Booth said, wishing that he could reveal that he'd gone where Harold was at the moment himself at one point even as he knew it wouldn't work; even if it was plausible for Seeley Booth to have spent some time on the streets, he'd hidden both because he didn't feel worthy to interact with other people _and_ because he didn't know how to do it in the first place. "I'm telling you that."

"I killed people," Harold said after a moment's pause.

"You saved five of your men," Booth responded, glancing briefly at the file to confirm that he was remembering that correctly.

"By shooting a pregnant woman," Harold responded.

"She had a grenade in her hand," Booth said (As much as he acknowledged Harold's point, this wasn't the time to let him get bogged down in his guilt; he had a crime to solve _now_ ).

"She had a child... in her arms," Harold replied, the simple pain in that statement telling Booth everything he needed to know about the kind of man he was dealing with. "I shot her and... the grenade went off. She died right away."

Booth simply stood as Harold spoke; the best thing anyone could do for the guy right now was to let him speak.

"That kid..." Harold said, clearly wishing he didn't have to discuss this memory, a faint gleam in the corner of his eyes, "took a while. He kept looking at me, but I...

"You did what a soldier had to do," Booth said, knowing it was weak even as he said it but unable to think of anything else.

"Yeah," Harold said, his voice faster now that he was off that topic, "You know... I was a good soldier- I was a very good soldier-but a pretty bad human being. Pretty bad human being."

"What happened to Marni?" Booth asked.

"I... I hadn't seen her in days, you know?" Harold said after a brief pause. "That's why I went to go take a look. Rats were all over her, man. All over her."

"How did you end up with her things?" Booth continued.

"Oh, you know, I was going to sell them," Harold said nonchalantly."I mean, she would have wanted me to have those."

"So you had nothing to do with her death?" Booth asked, being met with silence as he moved to sit down in the chair.

"I, um... I... I gave her something," Harold said at last. "And that's why she died."

"What did you give her?" Booth asked.

"Mr Overmeyer," the lawyer put in, "I'm advising you not to say anything else."

"You know what?" Harold said- he spoke so quickly that Booth wasn't sure if the lawyer's words had prompted him to clam up or if he'd been thinking about being silent already-, "I think it's best, um...I not talk about this anymore. Not cause any more trouble. I... I got to go."

"No, Harold, you can't, all right?" Booth said, standing up as Harold got out of his own seat. "Not yet. You've got-"

"Too bright in here!" Harold said as he walked towards the door. "I got to go!"

"Harold..." Booth said, moving to stand between Harold and the door, grabbing Harold's weak attempt at a punch- after what he'd gone up against in Hell as a human it would take more than the out-of-practise Harold to catch him off guard- and slamming him chest-first onto the table (He might not like it when he had to resort to violence so quickly while in human form, but he _was_ good at his job).

"I never wanted her to die," Harold muttered as Booth leaned over him, holding him in position. "She wouldn't listen! I warned her..."

Booth might be fairly sure that the lawyer wouldn't let him get any more out of Harold in the immediate future, but progress had at least been made; Harold might know more than what he'd said so far, but he was also sure that the guy wasn't the killer.

* * *

  
As he sat once again in the interrogation room, Booth wondered if he preferred this part of the job to his more straightforward approach to interrogation back when he was Angel; he might sometimes stand less chance of getting answers out of people when doing it this way- people really did tend to talk to you more when you were about to kill them-, but on the other hand it was a lot more civilised than figuring out what body-part to break or what you could threaten them with that they hadn't seen before.

"Harold," he said, as Bones sat in front of the other man, now dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, holding the small disc in her hand, "was this what you gave Marni Hunter?"

"Yeah," Harold said, looking down at the table as he shrugged slightly. "She liked it."

"Where did you get it?" Booth asked.

"Beyond the perimeter," Harold said, his hands moving forward slightly as though emphasising his statement.

"Harold?" Bones said, putting the object aside as she leant forward slightly. "Harold, you have to trust us. We just want to find who killed Marni. And you can help."

Harold looked at her more sharply at that comment, clearly wondering where she was going with this.

"You killed people," Bones continued (Normally Booth would make a mental note to talk with her about that kind of blunt attitude, but right now he couldn't think of a better way to phrase it that would get through to Harold, so he'd let it go). "Maybe this is your chance to put that right. You said you wish you hadn't given it to her. Why?"

"Did you take it from someone?" Booth asked, leaning over Bones's shoulder to look at Harold.

"The blonde," Harold said at last. "It was hers. And I shouldn't have taken it."

"A blonde killed Marni?" Bones asked (He always seemed to have bad luck with blondes; Darla had made things complicated from the beginning and things with Buffy, Kate and Nina had been tricky from then on).

"Marni went too deep," Harold said. "That's the blonde's territory."

"Does the blonde woman have a name?" Booth asked (For a moment, a part of him wondered if it could be Darla, but that thought stopped before it could even really start; even assuming there was some way to bring Darla back a second time, why would anyone bother?).

"People around me die," Harold said, ignoring the question. "Marni died."

"There's always going to be casualties, Harold," Booth said, pacing slightly behind the chair. "The important thing is to recognize the enemy, and take him out so more people don't get hurt."

"Can you take us down there, Harold?" Bones asked.

"No," Harold replied, shaking his head once again. "It's beyond the perimeter. I took Marni beyond the perimeter. I'm not going to make that same mistake again. Won't make that mistake again."

The content and circumstances might have been different, but in a way, Booth was reminded of his reasons for not mentioning his vampiric past to Bones; he didn't want to take her 'beyond the perimeter' of her rational, scientifically-organised life.

He'd done that to Kate- even if he'd tried to avoid telling her what she really was until that confrontation with Penn made a confession virtually inevitable- and she'd been fired and nearly driven to suicide; he wouldn't make that kind of mistake again.

* * *

  
As he stood in the room with the Angelator, looking at the 3-D projection that Angela had created to depict the current sewer system, Booth had to admit that he was impressed; his own past as Angel had given him a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the sewers of Los Angeles, but there was still a difference between knowing how to get from A to B and actually drawing up a complete map of everything in between...

"I entered all the modern and historical city plans, including ventilation shafts and tunnels, plus the newer schematics," Angela explained, looking at the group around her as her map enlarged to fill the projection area before her.

"There's also oral accounts of tunnel construction and underground passages," Goodman added, as Angela tapped a few controls and red and yellow tunnels joined the blue layout that had been there earlier.

"Wow..." Booth said, staring at the network before him; walking through something couldn't prepare you for the scale of seeing it laid out visually like this. "All that exists under the city?"

"Yes," Goodman said solemnly. "What we can corroborate."

"Good point," Booth said, reaching over to briefly touch Bones's arm. "Bones, you know, not rushing off to find those guys."

"How accurate is this?" Bones asked, ignoring his comment.

"Blue is modern, near 100% accurate," Angela replied, adjusting the display so that the yellow tunnels were more obvious. "Yellow is historical."

"Estimate 80%," Goodman added (It was one of those rare moments Booth wished that he was still Angel for more than just the enhanced strength; if he'd been Angel, he would have mapped that sewer system out in the first few months after moving to Washington, but without a reason to do so he hadn't actually done anything about it).

"Red represents less exact renderings from stories, memoirs, accounts from city workers..." Angela continued, adjusting the display once again.

"Unfortunately," Goodman noted, "if this treasure exists, it probably exists in one of the red tunnels."

"Well," Booth suggested, "we found that Civil War victim near a cave-in. Maybe the treasure's on the other side?"

"Inductive, reductive or deductive?" Goodman asked.

"Deductive," Bones said simply before Booth could ask for clarification..

"As you wish," Goodman said. "Ms. Montenegro, please remove all tunnels containing power, cable or utility lines."

"And fibre optics," Bones added.

"Yes..." Angela said, studying the controls before she glanced back at Goodman. "Also steam tunnels and transit access?"

"Oh, what about diamond dust?" Booth asked as most of the tunnels vanished from the display. "You said that there was diamond dust in the old tunnels. There was also diamond dust on the Civil War guy..."

His voice trailed off as he noticed the Jeffersonian staff looking at him in a manner that he couldn't quite identify.

"So... what?" he asked, allowing himself to appear slightly hurt to reinforce his point. "I'm not allowed to help now?"

He knew that a murder location would be involved in whatever they discovered at the end, but he was actually kind of enjoying this; it was nice to be able to find something _without_ the need to worry about time limits for stopping a ritual or something like that at the same time...

"That's inductive logic," Goodman clarified.

"We agreed on deductive," Bones elaborated.

"I'm sorry," Booth said (He missed the old days when you could just give options without arguing about the reasoning that led to that conclusion). "I'm just, you know, trying to think outside your box."

"Can you indicate where we found Marni Hunter's body and the Civil War victim?" Bones asked, after Angela had removed further tunnels from the schematic before them.

"'Cause, you know," Booth added, trying to get his side of the analysis back on track as the hologram adjusted to display two figures in the listed locations, "if Marni was killed near the treasure and moved, and the Civil War guy was murdered by his accomplice..."

"Mm, gotcha," Angela said briefly.

"Can you connect the two bodies?" Bones asked. As soon as she'd made the suggestion, the diagram was quickly adjusted to illuminate particular tunnels connecting to the area where the bodies were found.

"This one's the closest," Booth put in, indicating an area where two tunnels came close to each other.

"There's no way to get there..." Goodman mused.

"Wait," Booth said, waving his fingers slightly as he studied the diagram, "can you put some more blue lines back in that area?"

Noticing that Bones was staring at him, Booth shrugged. "It's just a guess; throwing it out there. Sue me."

As Angela returned the blue lines to the area, Booth was grateful to see that his hunch had paid off; a few blue tunnels _were_ pretty close to that area...

"And connect where Marni Hunter's body was found," Bones said, the illuminated tunnels now connecting up to each other as she watched. "Somewhere along that line is where the treasure is."

"What's that blue line?" Booth asked.

"Storm sewer," Angela explained, as she programmed the sewer in question to glow on the diagram. "H-15B."

"The weapon was a Hanks climbing axe," Zach suddenly said as he walked into the room, prompting Booth to exchange glances with Bones as inspiration struck.

They might still have to _catch_ the killers, but that last comment by Zack had given him _just_ what he needed to work out the last piece of the puzzle of this particular mess...


	18. The Skull in the Desert

As he walked up the path leading to the bungalow that Bones had given him directions to the previous night, along with the brief snack he'd grabbed for himself at the airport- even if he hadn't been able to eat it on the way over; he just didn't do well eating in motion, even if it was just on a jolting car seat-, Booth wondered briefly if he should count his ability to help in this kind of case as a positive or a negative thing; his ability to walk in sunlight as Booth might give him more opportunities to help than he'd possessed as Angel, but that didn't mean that heat wasn't still one issue he wished he didn't have to deal with.

God, he'd been on _fire_ a few times- when he'd been exposed to the sun didn't count as he'd done that on purpose a few times back when he'd been 'competing' against William in the days before the other vampire had started regularly calling himself Spike- and he didn't think he'd been this hot; what _was_ it with the weather round here...

Pushing that thought from his mind as he knocked on the door of the bungalow, Booth allowed himself a brief smile as Angela opened the door for him- Bones appeared to be sleeping on a fold-out couch near the door-; the artist might be going through a rough period right now, but, to her credit, she didn't appear to be noticeably shaken by what had happened to her.

"Hey," he said, smiling at her, trying to seem encouraging despite the grim circumstances that had prompted him to come here.

"Hey," Angela replied, giving him a quick hug that he nevertheless appreciated; they might not be close, but after decades of isolation and fear of succumbing to his basic instincts, there was something comforting about physical contact.

"You know," Booth said as he and Angela parted- although Angela maintained the hug for longer than he'd expected; she must _really_ need comfort right now-, "people in the desert don't have actual addresses. What's up with that?"

"Booth?" Bones said, still wrapped up in the covers of her fold-out bed even as her eyes appeared to be smiling at him. "You made it."

"Yeah," he said, as he flung a bag onto Bones's bed out of a lack of anywhere else to put it,

"I'm touring the hottest places in the universe; next stop- there you go-, Hell."

Admittedly, he wasn't _that_ interesting in going back to Hell after the incident with Alcathla, but it wasn't like Bones needed to know _that_ ; she'd just take it as another strange joke...

"I'm not really awake yet," Bones said, clearly annoyed at him as she sat up just enough to toss the bag over the side of the bed before lying back down.

"Last night," Booth said, taking off his sunglasses as Angela sat on the end of the bed, "before I left, I used my FBI powers to force the sheriff to send the skull back to the Jeffersonian. Talked to him this morning. You know, he seems a little resentful."

Despite the memory of the sheriff's resent, a part of Booth had to admit that he'd enjoyed being able to take control of an investigation; after so long with questionable investigative authority as Angel, it was nice to have the authority to take control of things, rather than just try and force his way into something that he knew people couldn't handle without him (He might not be _needed_ as Booth, but he could still make a significant impact even if he was only human now).

"What time is it?" Bones asked, reaching for her watch on a nearby table as Booth put a coffee cup down near on the table.

"Let's go," he said, indicating the coffee cup. "Drink that on the way."

"On the way where?" Bones asked, putting the watch down as she looked at him.

"You know, to go check out the model... guide... whatever's place," Booth said, waving his hand vaguely as he looked at Bones (If she was going to help him in his investigations, she had to recognise when she'd need to pull her weight).

"Dahni," Angela clarified, nodding in understanding. "Can I come with you?"

"No, no," Booth said, wishing he had a better way to say this even as he spoke. "We can ask tougher questions if you're not there."

Once again, Booth had to admit to being impressed by Angela's personal strength when she simply nodded in understanding at his statement; even some of his old friends as Angel would have disliked the idea of him 'assuming' that their partners might not have been faithful to them.

"Wait outside while I get dressed," Bones said, as she began to sit up.

"No, uh uh; the sun's been up for an hour out there, it's already the surface of Mercury," Booth said, shaking his head in refusal as he picked up one of the doughnuts he'd brought earlier in one hand while using the other to briefly cover his eyes as he closed them, ignoring Bones's indignant glare in his direction. "I can stand here, close my eyes, eat my doughnuts; best I can do, OK?"

He knew that teasing his partner probably wasn't the most mature thing for him to do, but he'd spent so much time disappointing his family in his first life and then he'd been too serious to do anything 'wacky' as Angel that he felt he was entitled to goof off when the situation wasn't _that_ serious.

* * *

  
As he drove along the desert road that would take them back to Angela's holiday house- although why anyone would willingly have a holiday in this kind of place Booth really didn't know; vampire or no vampire, there was something about this much heat that just made him feel uncomfortable-, he was already planning his next move after the squints' positive identification of the skull; he might be used to operating independently, but he had adapted to official policy over the last few years.

"I will call the F.B.I. office in Albuquerque and I will officially take over the investigation," he said; somehow, he felt more comfortable voicing his intentions in this kind of situation.

"I wouldn't do that," Bones interjected before he could say any more, the simplicity of her statement somehow more effective than if she'd said it louder or faster.

"Why?" Booth asked, glancing back at her in confusion; one of the reasons he joined the FBI rather than just becoming a detective in a city was the broader range of people that he could help with those kind of credentials, and hearing that he _couldn't_ help someone despite that was more than somewhat frustrating for him.

"Desert dwellers are very insular," Bones explained, with the same rapid tone she normally used when discussing her subject (Sometimes Booth forget that she was a cultural anthropologist as well as a forensic one). "Mongolians, Bedouins of the Sahara, the Himloa of Kanana; good hosts, but extremely distrustful of outsiders."

"Bones," Booth aid, rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses in exasperation, "this the United States of America; it's not Outer Mongolia."

"The only reason Sheriff Dawes talks to us at all is because we know Angela," Bones commented (Booth was suddenly put in mind of the times when he'd only walked away from his meetings with Gunn's crew- before Gio showed up and everything fell apart between them and Gunn, anyway- because Gunn had vouched for him rather than because anyone else on his friend's old team genuinely believed that he wasn't the same as other vampires).

"Alex Joseph held a gun on us."

"I admit I've met friendlier people," Booth noted (Although, given his social history in the past, anyone he met who _didn't_ want to kill him or be suspicious of him instantly tended to automatically win points).

"If a bunch of outsiders come in from Albuquerque, led by an outsider from D.C.," Bones said, looking earnestly at him, "I promise you, the people here will close ranks and shut up until we go away, then they'll take care of it in their own way."

"OK, who are you, Doctor Phil?" Booth asked, looking at Bones in surprise; that was probably one of the most insightful things she'd ever said when talking about _people_ rather than bones.

"Who's Doctor Phil?" Bones asked, her usual display of the ignorance in the face of modern popular culture reassuring Booth more than anything else could have; it was good to know that some things didn't change. "Some kind of expert?"

"He likes to think so," Booth muttered(He might be annoyed at this fresh reminder that being human didn't make his attempts to investigate crimes any easier- having to answer to someone else made things a bit harder; Angel might not have had much official authority, but it was a lot harder to stop a vampire going where he wanted to go-, but he could move on and cope with what he did have available to him). "OK, look, I'll take what you say under advisement. In the meantime, we need to go find out who supplied Kirk with his peyote."

"Well, how are we going to do that?" Bones asked.

"Talk to his girlfriend," Booth replied after a brief, awkward pause.

He always hated it when a case required him to investigate a friend; whether it was a hangover from his own guilt over what he'd made Buffy and her friends have to face as Angelus, or a memory of how he'd felt when he first saw Willow's vampire doppelganger at the Bronze, he hated having to even briefly suspect people he knew of being involved in a crime of some sort (Angela might not be a suspect, but he _was_ still questioning her about the death of her boyfriend; some people could see that as the same thing).

* * *

  
"Yeah," Booth said, casually studying Wayne Kellog as the engraver sat on the other side of the desk in the sheriff's office alongside his lawyer, passing him the piece of paper that he'd just received from the Hoover, "I got a warrant here to search your client's studio for engraving plates."

"Well," the lawyer- some guy called Larry Stansfield who put Booth in mind of a heavier version of that that 'Lee Mercer' guy who'd been beaten up by Faith, or maybe Gavin Park; great faith in the legal system with not much else going for him once that 'protection' was taken out of the picture- said, "as Mr. Kellogg's attorney, I can advise you you're certain to find some."

"I'm an engraver," Kellog said, in a tone that suggested Booth hadn't been aware of this earlier (God, why couldn't people just be smart in situations like this and admit the goddamn truth rather than trying to deny it all the time?).

"Larry," Sheriff Dawes said, looking pointedly at the lawyer, "did you tell Wayne about how when someone dies during the commission of a felony, everyone involved in that felony is charged with murder?"

"Counterfeiting is a felony," Booth added, allowing himself a moment's satisfaction as Stansfield and Kellog exchanged quick glances; he might not be Lindsey or Gunn, but when faced with the occasional difficulties of working in the system, it was always a pleasure when he was able to make those loopholes work for him.

"My client will confess to the counterfeiting charges in return for immunity from the murder charge," Stansfield said; Kellog seemed slightly frustrated at that turn of events, but at least he didn't object to this new angle of defence.

"Not good enough," Dawes replied (Booth wished that he could have given that kind of answer; the trouble with being an official agent was that too many other people would be criticised if he simply tried to beat a confession out of Kellog).

"He will also provide the time and place of the next pickup out in the desert," Stansfield added (Booth wondered how much this guy had known about what his client was up to; what kind of 'lawyer' allowed their client to knowingly break _this_ many laws?). "You'll be able to arrest the actual murderers."

"When Sheriff Dawes says 'Not good enough', he means his sister, Larry," Booth said, glaring at the lawyer with the same cold stare that had always made Lindsey shut up before he lost his hand and his hatred of Angel had become too intense for intimidation to really have an effect.

"My client doesn't know anything about Dahni Webber," Stansfield said.

"What _does_ he know?" Bones interjected, demonstrating her usual willingness to focus on the central point rather than surplus details.

"One week ago, I arranged to meet some associates at an airstrip in the desert to pass on some commissioned artwork," Kellogg said after a brief pause.

"He means counterfeit plates," Bones said (Bones wasn't sure if he should feel amused or exasperated at her attempt to 'help' him; he could make allowances for her own social ignorance translating into an ignorance of how others would react, but it could still be slightly frustrating at times).

"As the plane landed, my associates noticed two people spying on them from a vantage point above the airstrip," Kellogg continued, a slight edge of exasperation to his voice even if he continued to talk fairly calmly. "They became very agitated. They commandeered my vehicle and they drove up the hill. I got in my Humvee. Then I drove up there. But I didn't see anything."

"Like blood on the hood of your vehicle?" Bones asked, her hostile tone making it clear that she didn't buy his statement any more than Booth did.

"Well, the fact remains that agreeing to this deal is the only way that you're going to catch the actual murderers," Stansfield said as he and Kellog stood up and walked over to the office's exit (Booth couldn't really call it a door), frustratingly casual about the fact that what he was discussing could make the difference between life and death for an innocent woman. "You know where to find me."

"Wayne," Dawes said, standing up to face Kellog, "I need to know if they loaded Dahni onto that plane."

"I never saw Dahni," Kellogg replied.

Whether it was the simplicity of the other man's tone or just his own frustration at the situation, Dawes grabbed Kellog's collar and pushed him against the wall.

"Sheriff!" Booth said, quickly standing up and walking over to stand behind the sheriff, ready to stop the other man if he looked like he was going too far.

"That's my sister," Dawes said, glaring at the other man, his control clearly frayed to the brink at the thought of her loss. "My sister!"

"I am truly sorry about Dahni, Ben," Stansfield said, a hand on Dawes's shoulder as he spoke, his tone suggesting at the closest thing to sincerity Booth had heard from the guy since this whole mess started. "Truly sorry. But I don't think Wayne knows anything."

"Come on, Dawes," Booth said- as much as he might dislike Stansfield's attitude, this wasn't like the old days when Gavin Park would break down and start talking just at the sight of Angel standing in his office-, helping the man back away from Kellog after he'd released his grip on the other man's collar. "Easy. Come on..."

As Kellogg and Stansfield left the office, Booth stood and glared after them for a moment before he turned his attention back to Dawes, who was now sitting back in his chair as he breathed heavily, clearly still shaken at the implications of what they might have learned.

"I guess we're going to have to take that deal, right?" the sheriff said at last, looking at nothing specific as he spoke.

"I was trained as an army ranger," Booth said, mentally adding on the tracking skills he'd developed as Angelus to that 'resume'; his sense of smell might not be what it was, but everything else could still get the job done. "That mean anything to you, Sheriff Dawes?"

"Yeah," Dawes said, nodding as he looked at Booth with a slightly renewed sense of hope in his eyes.

"I'd be more than happy to go back out to that crime scene and see if there's anything we might have missed," Booth continued.

"Appreciate it," Dawes said, nodding briefly in response to Booth's offer.

The former vampire didn't know if he'd find anything, but he did know that he couldn't afford to just give up because he hadn't found something yet; there was a rational explanation for this- nothing supernatural that could live in this desert would have taken the time to hide Dahni's remains like they had apparently been concealed-, so there was definitely _something_ to find.

* * *

  
As he walked back to the bungalow after going over the last loose ends, Booth had to admit that he was generally rather satisfied with how things had gone; counterfeiters had been caught, murderers had been punished, and they'd managed to find Dahni Weber before she died of exposure.

He just wished that he still had access to Wesley or Giles after what Angela had just done; their research skills might have been better able to help him work out if there was something more to what had just happened than the obvious.

It could be a coincidence that she had managed to find Dahni in time to save her life, but Booth wasn't buying it. Of all the 'squints', he had always had a feeling that Angela would be the one to be most open to the possibility of there being something out there beyond the scientific; if any squint was going to show signs of talents outside of the norm, it was her (Not that he was going to _tell_ Angela about that side of the world; she might be able to handle its existence better, but that didn't mean that she could handle what really _lived_ in the world better than they could).

As he walked into the bungalow again, he smiled slightly as he saw Bones and Angela hugging; evidently, whatever they'd been discussing had been an emotional topic, but it looked like Bones had been able to help Angela get through the worst of it (Not that he'd ask about what it was, of course; even as Angel, he'd known when to stay out of what wasn't his concern).

"Well," he said, taking off his sunglasses as he looked at the two women, "Dawes and his deputies, they caught the counterfeiters. Dahni gave a statement saying that it was Kellogg who pulled the trigger on Kirk."

He focused his gaze on Angela as he moved on to his next topic. "Dahni knows that you saved her life. You pointed that helicopter in the right direction."

"Obviously," Bones said, turning away from him to look at Angela, "you subconsciously sifted through the rational facts of the case and processed the most likely scenario."

"I'm sure that's it," Angela said, smiling slightly in a faintly teasing manner as she looked at her friend.

"Yeah," Booth added, spreading his arms slightly in a mock-questioning manner that concealed his own awareness of the other explanations, "what else could it be?"

"Well, it's the only rational explanation," Angela said, continuing their 'joke'.

"Are you guys making fun of me?" Bones asked, looking uncertainly between him and Angela.

"You know," Booth said, deciding to cut that inquiry off before it could reach potentially awkward territory, "let's go back home, where there's water, shelter, and living things. Come on!"

As he grabbed his bag and walked away from the bungalow, Bones close behind him, he glanced briefly back to smile at the sight of Angela taking one last look around the place that had been her home for three weeks of each year, recognising in her stance the same feelings he'd felt when he had left his mansion in Sunnydale for the last time.

You could move on from your past, but when a place had that kind of impact on you, you could never really _forget_ it; you could just cherish your memories of it as you moved on to the next stage of your life and hope for the best.


	19. The Man with the Bone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus points to anyone who recognises the relevance of the "Angel" reference towards the end of this chapter...

As he walked into the side storage room, the file on what had been discovered about the bone in his hand, Booth smiled at the sight of the squints gathered around the table; somehow, the animated expressions on their faces leant him some hope that there was more going on here than just another talk about bones.

"Hey," he said, looking curiously between the squint squad, "what are we playing?"

"Doctor Brennan," Zack said, not looking up from the table where he was working, "the destroyer of evidence is here."

"OK," Booth said, the smirk fading as he walked into the room, "I assume that's a joke, so nobody gets hurt."

Even as he was speaking, however, he gave himself a few moments to considered what he'd just heard; for all of Zack's faults, the kid wasn't the type to _lie_...

"Did Harry really mess up that bone?" he asked, almost grateful that he didn't have to feel that offended on the other guy's behalf; one benefit of working in something like the FBI was that there were too many people employed by the agency for him to be as 'personally invested' in all of their abilities as he had been when he was running Angel Investigations.

"He dissolved any traces of ingrained particulates on the surface," Bones explained, examining the microscope-like device in front of her as Angela walked over to talk with Zack and Hodgins, "but we are still able to save some valuable attributes."

"Like what?" Booth asked.

"Alternating sclerotic and porotic areas on subperiosteal surface," Bones began, leaving Booth to casually examine his own finger through one of the nearby magnifying tools- he'd always been too confused by modern technology to take a closer look at Fred's stuff back when she'd run the science division even if her entire team _hadn't_ been evil; it was kind of nice to feel relaxed enough to look at this kind of thing- before Bones reached over and snatched the tool from his hand without pausing her speech, "demonstrates that whoever this was suffered from tertiary syphilis."

"Tertiary syphilis," Booth said, his hands in his pockets as he rocked contemplatively on his heels, his mind casting back to try and recall where he'd heard that disease mentioned before. "Whoa... wow, that's the worst."

"It was a common ailment in the seventeenth century," Hodgins put in from where he was studying a piece of bone with a magnifying glass.

"Which is where the bone dates from," Bones put in with a slight smile.

"Say what?" Booth asked (He had to wonder if _his_ bones would show that kind of age if he ever ended up on these examination tables; when the Powers had restored him to human form, had his skeleton 'regressed', or did it still show the years it had accumulated while he'd been Angel?).

"We ran a radiocarbon dating test," Zack said, walking around the table to pick up a file and hand it to Booth. "The finger's over three hundred years old."

"It's a unique find for the area," Bones said, sounding pleased with herself.

"I'm gonna change to French trapper," Angela added.

"You can't change yours," Hodgins muttered.

"Booth," Bones said, ignoring her team's comments, "where did they find the victim?"

"They shipped him over from some resort town next to a federal seaside preserve," Booth said, glancing over the file to refresh his memory. "Assateague Island."

"That's where the money pit is," Hodgins suddenly said, an eager tone to his voice.

"Money pit?" Bones repeated.

"Legend is..." Hodgins said, pausing with an overly melodramatic manner, "Assateague Island is where Blackbeard buried his treasure."

Despite his own age, Booth couldn't stop himself from looking enthusiastically at Hodgins, his mind flashing back to Xander and Gunn before he could stop himself; he could just imagine how _those_ two would have reacted to that kind of news (Giles and Wesley would have been more controlled, Oz wouldn't really have had that much to say, Spike was relatively indifferent to the past if it wouldn't help him survive his next fight, and he was never sure if Lorne knew that much about world history outside of the music side of things)...

"For three hundred years, people have been trying to find it," Hodgins continued, his words having now drawn the attention of everyone in the lab. "They've dug it out to something like a hundred and fifty feet, but they've found nothing. Every time they come close, they trigger a baffle that floods the pit with seawater."

"Booby traps," Zack said.

"Cool," Angela added, grinning.

"The body was found at a dig site," Bones noted, glancing over the files with almost frustrating casualness.

"This is the first concrete evidence that the treasure is more than a legend," Hodgins said, his enthusiasm clear in every word he spoke. "I'll bet this is from one of the men who buried the treasure."

"Pure conjecture!" Bones interjected (Booth wondered if he should make some kind of comment about Hodgins discarding his own 'rules' about theorising after all the stories he'd heard about his debates with Goodman, but quickly decided there wasn't a point to that approach; he didn't find Hodgins _that_ annoying).

"Pirate," Hodgins continued, his voice an eager whisper.

"Pirate?" Booth repeated.

"Pirate?" Zack said, eyes wide as he leaned on the table to look at Hodgins.

"It's a pirate," Hodgins said, clearly having abandoned his usual desire for meticulous evidence with this new idea.

"You can't change yours," Angela said, holding up an objecting finger.

"Wait," Booth said, unable to repress his excitement as he turned over this new theory. "So- so- the victim finds evidence that the treasure exists. Somebody else wants it all for themselves. That's certainly- that's a good motive for murder."

"We've gotta get out to that dig site and see what else we can find," Hodgins said, looking eagerly at him. "I'll be glad to help."

"That's OK," Booth said. "I'll- I can handle it."

"Come on, man, share the wealth!" Hodgins protested.

"We are looking for answers, Jack, not treasure," Bones said in an admonishing tone, stopping himself from asking why a man as private about his money as Hodgins would even _care_ about something like that.

"Do you really think that treasure exists down there?" Booth asked, ignoring Bones's comment about their focus on answers as he grinned at the thought.

"What do you think?" Hodgins asked.

Somehow, Booth couldn't help himself; he joined Hodgins as the two exchanged eager laughs at the thought of what they had just discovered, a similar if more subdued grin on Zack's face confirming that he shared their amusement.

"Why are you guys smiling?" Bones asked, a humouring yet confused expression on her face as she looked between the three men.

" _Pirates_!" Booth, Zack and Hodgins yelled simultaneously, grinning around at each other; it was the first time Booth had ever _really_ felt like he was connecting with his new teammates.

"It's a guy thing, sweetie," Angela said, with a resigned tone.

Somehow, the simplicity of that statement meant more to Booth than anything else Angela could have said; after years of being 'out of the loop' when it came to social terms back when he was Angel, the idea that he had progressed to the point where he could enjoy a 'guy thing' just like the rest of his colleagues was surprisingly pleasant.

* * *

  
Looking at Assateague Island from a purely recreational perspective, while ignoring the issue that he was there to investigate a murder, Booth had to admit that he could see why people liked coming here normally; even without the historical implications of Blackbeard's association with the area, it _was_ a very nice place...

Still, right now he wasn't here to sightsee; he was here to question the Mayor's wife about her alleged relationship with the dead man.

"Everyone knew Macy," Katie Ney said as they walked along the marina, an eager smile obvious even in her tone. "Helped Frank get elected."

"So, you would categorize your relationship as just friends?" Booth asked, trying to remain diplomatic; somehow, the fact that this woman's attire made him think of what Faith might have worn if she'd 'gone pirate' wasn't helping him focus...

"Yeah," Katie replied, looking away from Booth with an overly cheerful edge to her voice. "Friends. It's a small town; we're all friends."

"Well," Booth pointed out with a slightly sarcastic chuckle, "whoever killed Macy wasn't too friendly."

"He wouldn't hurt a soul; Macy," Katie said, a wistful expression on her face at the memory. "He was a sweet guy."

"The way you're talkin' about him," Booth said, deciding that it was time to cut to the chase, "it seems like you were more than just friends."

For a moment, Katie simply stopped walking as she turned to look at the water, her hand on the railing and her face twisted into an expression that Booth didn't need his past as Angel to recognise as self-loathing.

"Hardewicke told you, right?" she said, as she looked out at the sea. "Like he's such a saint."

"How involved were the two of you?" Booth asked, deciding to avoid answering that particular question.

"It was just... one of those things, you know?" Katie replied as she looked back at him. "I wasn't gonna leave Frank or anything. I guess I wanted to see what it was like to be with a real adventurer, rather than a guy who dresses up like one."

"Frank went after Hardewicke when he thought it was him," Booth concluded., leaving the implications of that statement up to the woman he was addressing.

"You think Frank killed him?" Katie said, looking at Booth incredulously. "You saw Frank."

"Well, yeah," Booth said, his tone careful as he spoke- there was no point angering a potentially useful witness-, "you know, he's a little, ah... a little unstable. And he finds out somebody... made a fool of him twice, I..."

"It's Hardewicke and the rich guy you should be looking at," the woman said resolutely. "Macy said they were all fighting over the money they were spending. Said Hardewicke didn't appreciate all the work he did, wanted to break up the company."

"Well, we're... we're looking at everyone," Booth said, noting that at least he'd found _something_ useful from this awkward experience. "Thanks."

"Sure," Katie said, only to stop him as he began to walk away. "But... all this coming up again... just try not to ruin my marriage, OK?"

Booth couldn't entirely believe this; she'd cheated on her husband for reasons that put him in mind of that 'Owen' guy that Buffy had dated briefly back in the early days of Sunnydale- he vaguely recalled meeting the guy once, although he mainly remembered that night as the first time he was even indirectly introduced to Cordelia-, and _now_ she was apologising?

"I made a mistake," Katie said, apparently fighting back tears as she spoke, "but I love that stupid pirate and I don't want to lose him."

"Well," Booth said, resisting the urge to point out that she was the only person to blame if she did lose 'that stupid pirate' after cheating, "thanks for talking to me. I'll... I'll be in touch."

There were times when Booth really didn't understand human relationships.

Say what you like about vampires, but at least relationships between them were simple; you spent time together, killed people together, fought together, occasionally stabbed each other in the back if survival demanded it, and that was that.

God, why _did_ some people feel this ridiculous need to try and look for adventure when they weren't capable of coping with that kind of pressure themselves...?

* * *

  
The trickiest thing about being Booth as opposed to being Angel, Booth reflected as he stood in Goodman's office, looking between Goodman and Cullen, was the fact that Booth had to answer to people; that year or so he'd spent when he was technically subordinate to Wesley didn't really count because he'd still been 'unofficially' in charge, given that Wesley had still been willing to listen to his recommendations or instincts when he felt it was important enough to rely on them...

"OK," Cullen said, the FBI Deputy Director pacing in one direction as Goodman paced the other way with his hands behind his back, leaving Booth to lean awkwardly against a chair as Bones stood off to the side, "let me see if I get this straight. The pirate bones you recovered came from the Jeffersonian to start with."

"Correct," Bones said.

"Three hundred year old bones stolen from our own pirate exhibit," Goodman clarified grimly.

"And then recovered by one of your own people?" Cullen asked.

"Doctor Hodgins," Booth confirmed, ignoring the implications of the fact that he'd just spoken of Hodgins as though he was one of his people rather than just a guy he occasionally worked with.

"Who brought them back to the Jeffersonian... where they were stolen again?" Cullen finished.

"Re-stolen... sir," Booth said, hoping he'd have the chance to make up for this particular issue later on; trying to cope with satisfying the demands that both Cullen and Goodman could make on his time wasn't exactly simple...

"You've got a security problem, Doctor Goodman," Cullen said, looking bluntly over at Goodman.

"And when I find out who did this, you may have a murder problem," Goodman said, a mildly defensive tone to his voice.

"But I'm on top of it, OK?" Booth said, looking at Goodman before he turned to Cullen. "You didn't have to come down here, sir."

"That's what I thought until I got a call from someone on the Department of Defence," Cullen replied, folding his arms as he glared over at Booth.

"Defence?" Booth repeated, wondering what political twist he'd missed for this case (God, he missed the old days of fighting Wolfram & Hart; at least if he'd upset anyone during a case back then they'd have been people he'd _want_ to upset). "How do they figure into a murder investigation?"

"Branson Rose," Cullen responded. "He has friends in high places and they don't like it when the guy who builds their bombers is unhappy."

"Are they afraid he'll bomb them?" Bones asked, leaving Booth to look over at his partner in exasperation at her usual lack of tact in front of his goddamn _boss_ (God, he _hated_ being subordinate like this; at least when Wesley was put in charge of Angel Investigations he'd been confident that he made a valid independent contribution to the team that would encourage them to keep him on).

"What?" Cullen said, glaring at Bones before he shifted his gaze over to Booth. "What is that? Squint humour? Because I'm not laughing."

Booth simply stood in silence, his head down and jaw tightening to stop himself saying anything he'd regret later on.

"Defence doesn't need a reason to go to war, and I'm not about to be their next target," Cullen concluded.

"We haven't ruled Rose out as a suspect," Bones put in.

"Well, of course not," Cullen said slightly sarcastically. "You're too busy looking for your bones."

"Let's not make this personal," Goodman cut in.

"Rose wants to keep playing in the mud, and his big-shot friends are going to see that that happens unless we come up with some answers fast," Cullen continued, apparently accepting Goodman's protest and moving on from that line of inquiry.

"At this point," Booth said, wanting to reassure Cullen that they were still doing their job, "it appears as if the stolen 300-year-old bones are being used to, you know, salt the shaft."

"'Salt the shaft'?" Bones repeated (Booth wondered sometimes if part of the reason he liked spending time with her was the opportunity to be the one offering social advice after he'd spent so long being the one receiving it).

"Yeah," he explained, standing up to face her. "You know, an investor spends a million bucks, he gets antsy when nothin' happens, and then- _viola_ \- you know, pirate bones appear and, uh, the golden goose keeps, you know… laying those eggs."

"OK," Bones said, looking at him with her usual expression of cultural confusion- how had she missed hearing the tale of the goose that laid the golden eggs, for crying out loud?-, "that is a... convoluted metaphor, Booth."

"It's a hoax, Doctor Brennan," Goodman clarified. "Like Piltdown man."

"Oh, got it," Bones said, before she turned to look questioningly at Booth. "Why can't you be clear like that?"

"Assume the bones were stolen-" Cullen said, cutting off Booth's attempt to remember exactly what the 'Piltdown Man' thing they were referring to was (He _thought_ it was some kind of fake alien skeleton, but he wouldn't like to swear to it; that kind of thing had always been Gunn's line of interest rather than his).

"Re-stolen," Bones corrected again.

"Re-stolen so you wouldn't figure out they were bogus," Cullen corrected himself without complaint, "how did you?"

"How did I what?" Bones asked.

"From the finger," Goodman clarified, recognising what Cullen meant. "They didn't get the entire skeleton. Would you like Doctor Brennan to take you through the process?"

"I really, really wouldn't," Cullen groaned, shaking his head briefly before he turned to Booth. "So who do you like?"

"I like the partner," Booth said, confident of his ground on this theory; his fondness of the memories evoked by the man's first name wouldn't let him cut the guy _that_ much slack, after all.

"Giles Hardewicke," Bones confirmed.

"Access, motive, ability," Booth clarified with a slight smile.

"Doctor Goodman, the F.B.I. will provide whatever help you need to solve your breach of security at the Jeffersonian," Cullen said, before he turned to Booth. "You work the, uh, partner angle."

As Cullen walked out of the office, Booth could only hope he looked calmer than he felt; in this situation, an idea wasn't the same thing as a confirmation, and they still had no _concrete_ evidence to identify the killer one way or the other...

* * *

  
As he pulled up in the excavation field, Booth tried not to feel too intimidated at the sight of Dane McGinnis on the platform as he exited the car (He'd worry about the implications of the guy being crouched down later).

"Guy was a navy SEAL," he commented to Bones as he walked around the truck, answering her earlier question about McGinnis's military position.

"So?" Bones asked. "You were a guide."

"A ranger," Booth corrected, grateful for anything to distract him from what he was about to do (It was frustrating how reliant he still was on his old vampiric near-invulnerability at times, but he wasn't going to let Bones use the wrong term for his mortal profession that casually). "I was a ranger, Bones, OK? I was _not_ a guide; guides, they show you waterfalls, they sell you cookies. I was a ranger."

"What's he doing at the shaft?" Bones asked, walking towards the platform before Booth grabbed her arm, a horrible suspicion dawning on him as he looked at their latest 'enemy'...

"Are rangers afraid of SEALs?" Bones asked, drawing him back to the present once again.

"What?" Booth said, shooting Bones a look; after so long being something that gave most demons and humans automatic nightmares, he hated it when people drew attention to his current shortcomings. "Come on, Bones, no. Wha- rangers aren't afraid of anything, all right?"

The look he received in response prompted him to amend that statement with "SEALs are... pretty good, though."

With that said, he turned his attention back to the platform as he and Bones advanced towards their target, quickly taking in the sight of Dane sitting on a crate as he fed an air line down through the shaft, only occasionally glancing at the monitor alongside him as he worked.

"Hey, Dane," Booth said, quickly noting the implications of the current situation; maybe they could bluff their way through this and get everyone back up before revealing their knowledge of his crime.

"Oh, hey," Dane replied, his tone equally casual. "What's up?"

"We know it was you," Bones said, quickly ending any thoughts Booth might have had of bluffing his way through this situation as Dane's expression became grimmer.

"Bones, please," Booth said, resisting the temptation to sound more vocal as he spoke.

"Why?" Bones asked. "You have a gun. What's he got?"

"He's got somebody in the shaft," Booth replied, wondering how someone who could spot minor indentations on bone could miss something that obvious.

" _How far down am I_?" a voice said over the radio, Booth recognising the voice even before Bones asked if it was Hodgins. Before he had finished processing the identity of the voice, Dane had already grabbed a section of the air hose and was holding a knife to it.

" _Hey, Dane_?" Hodgins said, unaware of the danger he was in as Booth pulled out his gun and aimed it at the other man, Bones simply frozen beside him. " _I can't read my depth display. Hey, is somethin' goin' on? Is there annny-body up there? Why don't you answer me_?"

"C.P.O. McGinnis, step away from the air hose," Booth said, trying not to think about

"Yeah?" Dane replied, his manner grim as his knife remained against the air hose. "Well, I need you to toss that gun into the shaft. And toss me your keys. And handcuff yourselves to that crane. I take your truck."

Booth could only shake his head at that order; he was _not_ going to let this guy get away...

"Otherwise," Dane said, still staring coldly at him- for some reason Booth couldn't help but feel reminded of Corbin Fries; the scale of the threat might be different, but in both cases innocent bystanders were the ones who were going to suffer if the other guy couldn't escape punishment-, "I am gonna cut this hose, and your buddy's gonna die."

"Yeah," Bones said, nervously patting his ribs with the back of her hand as she stared at the knife. "Do that."

"Bones," Booth said, trying to ignore the part of himself that wished he could agree with Dane's order before he turned his attention fully back to the other man. "Not gonna happen."

" _If you can hear me_ ," Hodgins continued, " _tug on the air hose. I feel a blast of cold water. It's either a spring or some kind of conduit from the ocean. It's clear, clean water, so visibility is better_."

"You killed two men," Booth continued, trying to ignore Hodgins's voice; he'd failed to save too many friends already, and he was _not_ going to lose another because some guy felt like other people had treated him harshly. "I can't just let you drive away."

"Oh, those guys," Dane said, a bitter sneer to his tone as he stared unblinkingly back at Booth

"Puttin' fake bones in there, makin' the whole thing into a con job. My brother died down there looking for that treasure. A lot of good men did. This was their life. Those men dishonoured them."

" _Dane, can you hear me, man_?" Hodgins said again, the monitor on the platform confirming the 200-foot distance between the forensic entomologist and oxygen if he lost his air hose. " _I am on the bottom_."

"You good enough to take that shot before I cut this air hose, ranger?" Dane asked with a slightly taunting tone.

"Pretty good," Booth replied; after aiming a crossbow, guns were really almost simpler by comparison, even if he'd never really used them back in the day due to his greater reliance on physical strength.

"What?" Bones asked apprehensively. "Just pretty good?"

"Please, I'm working," Booth whispered impatiently at her, his eyes briefly flicking away from Dane to look at her before he returned his attention to the other man.

" _I'm gonna need some more slack in the line, Dane_ ," Hodgins said, his hands visible on the monitor as he searched through the soil below him. " _What's going on? I'll get a sample. I can see where the shaft wall has collapsed before... oh my God_."

As Hodgins paused in his search, Booth tried to ignore his awareness of Bones's anxious glances at the monitor showing Hodgins's current status; he had to stay _focused_...

" _Holy sh- Damn_!" Hodgins said, clearly enthusiastic about his new find. " _Can you see this, Dane_?"

As Bones leaned over to view the monitor, Booth risked a glance of his own, but refused to show his satisfaction at the sight of Hodgins holding a shiny gold coin; they might just have gained the _one_ bargaining chip they needed to save Hodgins's life...

"What is it?" Dane asked, still staring straight ahead of himself.

"Why don't you take a look?" Booth retorted grimly.

"Yeah," Dane said, a wry expression on his face. "I do and you'll shoot me."

" _Dane_!" Hodgins continued, holding the coin up to the lamp on his helmet to get a better view of his discovery, laughing with glee. " _Can you see this, man_?"

"It's a gold coin," Bones said.

"Yeah," Dane said, disbelief clear in his voice even as a slight edge of desperation in his voice made it clear that he still _wanted_ to believe what he was hearing. "It's, uh, probably something else they stole from the museum and threw in there."

" _This is real_!" Hodgins said, the other man's simple honesty dashing that line of argument before Dane could really start to convince himself of it. " _It's a big_ -!"

Seizing what might be his last chance, Booth quickly shifted his gun to point at the monitors and fired twice, blasting out the monitor and terminating all sound connection to Hodgins before he trained the gun back on Dane, smoke streaming from the now-cracked monitor.

"You want to see it, you're going to have to bring Hodgins up," Bones said, looking firmly at Dane before her voice softened. "Please. He's down there because he believes."

For a moment, the only sign that Dane had even heard Bones's attempted plea was a slight furrow around his brow, prompting Bones to try again.

"He's no different than you," she said, her tone still the same earnest honesty that had first drawn him to her. "No different than your brother."

"Bring him up," Booth said, his gun ready and his voice intense as he looked at the other man.

"Do it for your brother," Bones added, a gentleness to her voice that Booth could never have believed he would hear from the socially inept anthropologist back when they'd started working together...

After a long moment, Dane visibly struggling with himself while Booth kept the gun trained on him, the ex-SEAL yanked the knife away from the hose, dropping the hose into the water before thrusting the knife into the grid near his foot in obvious frustration with himself.

The worst part was over; now all Booth had to do was get Hodgins up and get Dane into custody, and let _other_ people worry about the treasure...


	20. The Man in the Morgue

As he stood in the voodoo shop, Booth had to wonder how things had reached this stage; even after all the years since he'd been Angel, somehow he _still_ ended up dealing with some kind of supernatural-esque case.

Admittedly, he doubted that whatever had happened to Bones would actually involve demons or spirits- if anyone was capable of throwing off supernatural attacks, it would be Bones; she'd probably logic the spell or spirit to death before it could do a thing to her-, but there was definitely something going on here beyond the obvious.

He just wished that she could have been the victim of some kind of more conventional magic; even when you weren't dealing with the actual corpses, voodoo was _murder_ on the nose regardless of if you were a vampire or a human...

"Whoa," he said, taking of his glasses as he studied a building that looked like a less welcoming version of the Magic Box (One thing about being a vampire that he didn't miss was how sharp some scents could be; this place would have just _reeked_ if he'd still been Angel right now). "What's that smell?"

"I imagine everything smells in here," Bones said, only for Booth to find his attention drawn to a picture of a red Cadillac Brougham on the counter.

He might have only an amateurish interest in cars- his restoration hobby was based on the times he'd spent working as a mechanic in the past to make some money in his better, pre-Buffy days, and it was an easy way to kill time in his present human state-, but that car was a _serious_ work of art.

"Whoa..." he said, bending over to examine it with an exaggerated awe in his manner; it never paid to ensure that people underestimated you, particularly when he now lacked most of his old advantages. " _Please_ just tell me that that car survived Katrina."

"We used it to evacuate," a man said as he walked through a beaded room divider into the main store, dressed casually in a white shirt and fawn waistcoat with greying dark hair.

"Did you restore it yourself or did you use voodoo?" Booth asked, falling back on his now-usual jocular manner when dealing with the supernatural; if he encouraged the idea that he didn't believe, it could give him an edge when dealing with a serious practitioner.

"Ah, an unbeliever" the man said, chuckling slightly as he put down a book that he was holding. "What can I do for you?"

"You, uh..." Booth said, taking the ingredients bag they'd acquired from the John Doe's corpse out of his pocket and putting it on the counter, "you know what that is?"

"This is a dark spell," the store-owner said instantly. "Forbidden magic. Very strong. This is Secte Rouge. I certainly wouldn't make anything like this."

"But you have the ingredients here?" Booth asked, trying not to think about the implications of the 'spell' comment; the last thing he wanted was anyone else being cursed...

"Well, the individual ingredients are not malignant," the store-owner said grimly. "It is how they are combined and what intention they are used for that makes a spell good or bad."

"Do you recognise me?" Bones asked, leaning forward slightly.

"No," the man replied with what seemed like honest confusion (With his partner's sanity at stake, Booth would accept _nothing_ at face value). "Should I?"

"Anyone else work here?" Booth asked, noting the slight disappointment on Bones's face at this news.

"My daughter, Eva," the man replied with a proud smile. "What is this about?"

"We're conducting an investigation," Booth said, showing his FBI badge.

"Eva!" the man yelled, before turning back to address them. "What kind of investigation?"

"Is it true that this is the only place a person could buy black gum root?" Bones asked.

"Yes," the man confirmed. "Most places like this are all gone now. It's not a coincidence."

As he turned around, he passed them a small sample of black gum root, just as a young woman in an orange dress entered from the back room.

"Yes, Daddy?" she asked, looking at the shop owner inquiringly.

"Have you ever seen this lady before?" he asked, indicating Bones as the anthropologist looked back at her

"No," the new arrival said in confusion. "Why?"

"We need to know who's brought this lately," Bones said, holding up the black gum root.

"Don't they need a warrant?" Eva asked her father.

"Ah," her father said, laughing uncomfortably before apparently deciding to ignore that question. "Eva will pull up what you need on the computer. Eva?"

Booth privately noted the prompting tone of the shop-owner's voice even as Eva moved over to the computer to begin carrying out his request; he didn't know quite why just yet, but there was definitely _something_ going on there...

"What you said before," he asked, deciding to focus on questions he had a better chance of learning the answers to, "what did you mean just a coincidence?"

"Most places like this, where a houngan, a priest, can get what he needs, they are all gone now," the shop-owner explained, an awkward tone to his explanation that could have been the result of him not believing what he was saying or because he thought they wouldn't believe it.

"Because of the hurricane and the flood?" Bones asked.

"Which occurred because of a lack of balance," the shop-owner replied.

"Mr Benoit," Bones said- Booth didn't bother about her currently sceptical tone; even with his experience of magic-wielders, he doubted this place had anyone even approaching the level of Willow or Cyvus Vail-, "are you suggesting that Secte Rouge somehow conjured up a hurricane?"

"Secte Rouge voodoo is much more powerful than ours," Eva began from where she was still working on the computer.

"No, Eva, not more powerful," Mr Benoit said, looking over pointedly at his daughter. "Destruction is easier than harmony, but not more powerful." He shrugged slightly as he looked back at Booth and Bones. "There are a lot of misunderstandings about voodoo."

"Yeah, that whole zombie thing puts a crimp in your public relations, I bet," Booth said, trying not to think about the disturbing reminders of some of the spells he'd seen in the past that had reanimated the dead; he didn't want to jinx this whole situation by trying to look for things that might not be there.

"These are the people who have bought black gum root in the past month," Eva said, handing Bones a list that she quickly scanned before one name caught her attention.

"Graham Legiere, the medical examiner," she said, handing the list to Booth as he studied it grimly.

Even if this 'Legiere' guy turned out to be a dead end, he was still the only person on their list that Bones recognised by name, which gave them a _very_ promising personal connection...

* * *

  
After so long possessing the necessary authority to investigate most crime scenes that he encountered, the idea that he was once again 'reduced' to an unofficial observer as the local police department photographed the body that was most likely Graham Legiere was something that Booth was already certain he didn't like; he'd been virtually useless when he was Liam, he'd done very little with his life when he initially regained his soul- obviously anything he didn't as Angelus didn't count because it wasn't _him_ -, and he'd promised himself long ago that he wouldn't sit by if he could do something in future.

The fact that the body had been arranged in such a manner only made it more disturbing; all those stakes that had been keeping it held up there, and the only thing he could do was stand back in case someone started asking questions about why 'Seeley Booth' was so interested in the occult...

"What exactly were you doing here?" the woman who'd introduced herself as Detective Harding said, her notebook in her hand as she addressed him and Bones at the top of the stairs.

"It's Graham, isn't it?" Bones asked.

"Tell you what, Doctor Brennan," Harding said, looking firmly at his partner as she folded her arms. "I'm going to ask the questions."

"Oh, come on, Detective, she was working with the guy," Booth protested.

"How closely?" Harding asked.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Bones asked, clearly as close to indignant as he'd ever heard her sound (She really wasn't that expressive at the best of times).

"Answer my question, please," Harding said. "What brought you here? Was it a social call? Business? Revenge killing?"

"Look," Booth said, glaring at the detective- why were some investigators so focused on finding what they perceived to be the easy answer rather than getting the facts?-, "Legiere bought some black gum root from the voodoo store; we just stopped by to ask why."

"Why?" Harding asked.

"That's what we came here to ask," Bones said, her usual literal manner once again making a difficult situation even more awkward.

"You wanna look behind me and remind yourselves why I'm a little low on sense of humour?" Harding asked, glaring at the anthropologist.

"That wasn't a joke," Bones said, with that usual confusion that Booth privately found amusing if it wasn't for the fact that this was a serious situation.

"Oh, no, she's not wisecracking," Booth said, anxious to end that particular train of thought before it got any worse. "She just tends to be a bit literal."

As Bones began to tell Harding about the mojo she'd found in that John Doe's mouth, Booth casually scanned the corridor, looking for that one little clue that might fill in the gaps in this whole mess-

His eyes fell on a distinctive earring lying by the leg of a hall table- an earring whose 'twin' was hanging from Bones's uninjured ear-, and he barely resisted the urge to swear.

Even if he knew that Bones could only have been here by chance, _that_ couldn't be good...

"Look," he said, turning to look back at Harding as she sarcastically asked his partner when the amnesia had occurred in relation to the voodoo consultation, "the amnesia's real."

"Graham purchased a rare ingredient at a voodoo shop on Pontchartrain Avenue," Bones added.

"So," Harding said, "Graham made voodoo spells, shoved them into corpses' mouths, then pretended to be surprised when he found them?"

"What's that?" Booth asked, as another policewoman came up beside them with something in her hand.

"Ma'am?" the policewoman asked, ignoring Booth as she turned to talk with Harding. As the two women examined whatever had just been discovered, Bones walking over to get a better look, Booth took advantage of the brief moment when no attention was being paid to him to bend down and pick up the discarded earring he'd seen earlier, slipping it into his pocket just as he heard Harding order the new discovery to be bagged as evidence.

"Secte rouge?" Bones asked.

"What do you know about Secte Rouge?" Harding asked, turning to glare at Bones just as Booth stepped back, the earring safe in his pocket.

"If you're done with us, Detective, we're going to go," Booth said, taking Bones's arm and heading for the stairs.

"I'm gonna tear this place apart," Harding said firmly, "and if I find one piece of evidence that ties you to this scene, I will take you into custody."

"Wait, do you really think that someone could go into a trance, commit a murder like that, and not remember it?" Bones asked.

"No, I don't," Harding said with a brief shake of her head. "But I sure as hell think someone can fake amnesia."

"That's great; thank you, detective," Booth said, quickly ushering Bones out of the building before she could say anything else.

Knowing Bones, she'd probably just go and incriminate _herself_ if he let her stick around here any longer than was absolutely necessary, despite the fact that the voodoo stuff alone could rule her out; she'd never go to _those_ kind of lengths to fake a murder scene even if she was capable of that kind of thing...

* * *

  
"It could have been me," Bones said (Booth was just grateful they'd returned to her hotel before she started sprouting this kind of theory; for a woman with such an allegedly high IQ, Bones could be so _thick_ at times).

"Do you remember that?" he asked, looking resolutely at her.

"Look at it objectively," Bones said. "Graham Legiere was killed between 11:00 p.m. Tuesday and 3:00 a.m. Wednesday. Not only do I not have an alibi, I...I can't even explain to myself where I was. It could've been me."

"No, it couldn't," Booth said, trying to lighten the grim mood that he felt threatening him after that last statement sunk in.

He _knew_ that Bones couldn't do something that brutal to anyone- he'd learned long ago how to determine what some people were capable of and what they weren't capable of, and Bones was _not_ capable of being that single-mindedly 'devoted' to torturing someone to death, regardless of what they did to her-, but the idea that she could _believe_ it...

"How do you know?" Bones asked, the question drawing Booth's attention back to the present conversation.

"I just know, OK?" he said, looking thoughtfully out of the window; the situation that had brought him here might be grim, but this city wasn't that bad a place. "I'd bet my professional career on it. I already did."

"What?" Bones asked.

"Nothing," Booth said promptly; with Bones in her current mode of thought, the last thing he wanted was to give her anything that might support her mad idea that she'd killed somebody last night.

"What did you do?" Bones asked again.

"Bones!" Booth said, glaring at her. "Stop; this is the last time and place that you want to be rational, OK? Let's just be wildly emotional and assume that you didn't psychotically murder a co-worker who invited you over for dinner."

His train of thought was halted as he noticed something on her pillow. "What's that?"

"What?" Bones asked.

"That," Booth said, pointing at the item, Bones quickly walking over to pick it up with a slight murmur of disgust that told Booth everything he needed to know about how disgusting it would have to be to inspire that kind of reaction.

"Is it another voodoo dumpling?" Booth asked, as Bones began to examine the object.

"It's some kind of flesh," she said, examining the interior. "And these are seashells... and leather, I think."

"Is that a human tooth?" Booth asked, squinting slightly as Bones took the object in question out of the bag.

"Yes," Bones said. "A canine."

Before Booth could ask her if the tooth's presence had any significance to her, the door to the room suddenly burst open and Detective Harding rushed in, her gun drawn and several other policemen behind her, their weapons aiming at the two already in the room even before Booth drew his own gun.

"Put down your weapon, Agent Booth," Harding said.

"Put down your weapon," Booth countered. "There's no threat from us."

"You're holding a gun on me," Harding countered.

"Yeah, well, you know," Booth said, waving his finger and resisting the urge to point out that they were the ones who'd broken into a room without declaring themselves first, "my finger here, it is not on the trigger; it's the best I can do under the circumstances."

"Holster your weapons," Harding said after a moment's pause, placing her gun back into her holster, followed by the other detectives. "I'm here to arrest Dr. Brennan for the murder of Graham Legiere."

"Whoa, that's not gonna happen," Booth said, walking forward to glare firmly at the detective.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is," Harding countered.

"I told you, Booth-" Bones began.

"Bones, please!" Booth said; how anyone could be this smart and lack so much common sense totally bemused him (Willow, Wesley and Fred had been prone to talking too much at times, but that was just them getting enthusiastic about their topics rather than ignorance of how everyone around them would react). "Just once in your life, will you be quiet?"

"That's good advice because everything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law," Harding said, her gaze falling on the bag they'd been examining earlier. "What is that?"

"I... I found it on my pillow," Bones said, handing the bag to Harding.

"Bones!" Booth groaned- why such a smart woman was being so careless about her _own_ possible freedom he didn't know-, ignoring Harding's brief thanks as she dropped the mojo bag into an evidence bag before focusing on the key issue of any arrest. "What's the probable cause?"

"Traces of Dr. Brennan's blood in Legiere's home, Legiere's blood on her clothing from the clinic," Harding replied.

"Is that it?" Booth asked; those things could account for Bones finding the body and trying to _help_ the guy rather than her being responsible for his _death_.

"All I'm prepared to share with the federal government," Harding said

"Now please, step away from my collar."

"I'm afraid I can't let that happen," Booth began, only for Bones to step forward and offer herself to Harding, leaving Booth to slap himself on the head in frustration. "Bones! Geez!"

"It's better if nobody else dies while we get to the bottom of this," Bones said as Harding put the cuffs on her.

"Well, you know what, I wasn't planning on dying," Booth said, looking in exasperation at the anthropologist.

"It's not you I worry about," Bones said, wincing slightly as the handcuffs were applied to her wrists. "You're welcome to the room; it's paid for."

As Harding shoved his partner out of the room, Booth could only wait until they'd all gone before he pulled her earring out of his pocket, staring at it in frustration as he tossed it into the air out of a lack of anything else to do with himself.

Even if he had access to evidence that the rest of them didn't have, he _knew_ that Doctor Temperance Brennan wasn't a killer; the only question now was how to convince the police department of that fact when even Bones herself thought that she could have done this...

* * *

  
As he sat in the restaurant, looking at his battered but unbowed partner as Sam Potter walked away, Booth could only hope that whatever 'spell' the guy trying to conceal the truth about John Doe 361 had used on Bones marked the limit of whatever magic potential he might have; as it was, her lack of memory could be attributed to natural, if slightly strange, circumstances, but anything more and he really ran the risk of forcing Bones to confront something that he wasn't sure she'd ever be ready to face...

"How'd I get away?" Bones asked, looking uncertainly at him as their food arrived in front of them. "You know, Graham got killed. I got away. How'd I do that?"

"You know, Bones," Booth said, casually picking at his food, "all those things that Carolyn mentioned, you know, the...the martial arts, the shooting, the...uh...the assaults... It's just...you're the type of woman that fights. Maybe they didn't expect it. Maybe they thought some kind of magic could hold you."

"I don't believe in magic," Bones said.

"Exactly," Booth said, pointing at her in a firm manner. "You're a surprising woman. Sometimes that's enough for getting away."

The smile Bones gave him in response was enough to distract him from the worst parts of the memories that statement evoked; memories of a young woman from Texas, as brilliant in her field as Bones was in hers, who'd survived so many dangers because nobody expected her to be capable of doing so, finally felled by a force that consumed her from within...

"Why are you nice to me?" Bones asked.

"Because..." Booth said, looking contemplatively at her before he decided on the best answer in this situation. "Because they think they get away with it."

"What?" Bones asked.

"They burn their victim, they blow 'em up, they toss 'em in the ocean, they bury them in the desert, they...they throw 'em to wood chippers," Booth explained, smiling as he verbalised what he liked most about their line of work; they could catch the people who might otherwise have gotten away with it because it took too long to discover the evidence of their crimes. "Sometimes, you know, years go by. They relax. And they start living their lives like they didn't do anything wrong. Like they didn't spend somebody else's life in order to get what they got. They think they're safe from retribution. But, you make those bastards unsafe. That's why I'm nice to you."

"I couldn't do that without you, Booth," Bones said, a wistful tone to her voice.

"Yeah," Booth said, taking the opportunity to lighten the mood. "So... uh, you should be a little nicer to me, huh?"

As he smiled at her, he was grateful to see Bones smile back at him; after the past few days, the fact that she could smile at anything was a greater indicator that she was going to be OK than anything else he could have witnessed.

"I really should," Bones said thoughtfully.

"Yeah," Booth replied.

"I walk in on something?" Carolyn Julian's voice suddenly said, the distinctive form of the overweight red-haired woman walking towards them to stand beside their table (She might be an unusual presence, but Booth had to admire her ability for getting the job done, even if it wasn't exactly the kind of job he'd asked her here to perform).

"Beignet and a cafe," she said to a nearby waiter, before she sat down in the now-vacant seat at the table. "Hospital records. The tox screen was negative."

"What?" Bones said, her former good mood replaced by confusion. "That's impossible."

"No Rohypnol, no ketamine?" Booth asked (He might not be a science whiz, but he _did_ pay attention).

"Nothing but a touch of alcohol; not enough to affect a baby," Caroline said firmly. "A jury is never going to believe this amnesia story."

"Well, it's true," Booth said, wishing that he had something more to offer than a defence that he knew was weak even as he said it.

"Maybe this is true, too," Caroline said, turning to look at Bones. "Legiere tried to rape you- he was a notorious horn dog-; we claim self-defence, cop a plea, you're out in three years."

"Nah," Booth said, looking firmly at Caroline. "I don't care what it looks like or how you're reading the evidence, Carolyn; she didn't do it."

"Could be that's true, Seeley," Caroline said, not responding to the obvious gratitude on Bones's face as she looked at him; for Booth, the fact that he had a credible lawyer fully on his side was one of the real indications of how much he had changed since his time as Angel. "You vouch for her, that's good enough for me. But, chéri, this looks bad. All you've got on your side is proof you got roughed up; these pictures from the clinic, these X-rays..."

"My wrist," Bones said, studying the X-rays in the files that Caroline had just passed to her. "The doctor was wrong. He said this was a Colles fracture from a fall. This break shows surface trauma on the outside of the bone; this was either defensive or someone slammed my wrist into something."

"Maybe because you tried to stab him in the heart with a knife?" Caroline pointed out.

"No, think about it," Bones said, smiling as she spoke. "If I'd already stabbed the attacker, he wouldn't have been able to break my wrist."

"I like this story," Caroline said, voicing Booth's own satisfaction to hear his partner finally trying to defend herself. "What else?"

"Well, there's the mojo bag," Booth said; given the circumstances, he could probably get away with saying that he believed the intent even if he doubted that it would have actually worked. "I mean someone was trying to put a forgetting spell on her."

"Booth," Bones said indignantly.

"Hey, I can work with that," Caroline said with her version of a smile on her face. "This is New Orleans, baby."

They might still had some way to go to determine where to look next, but at least Bones was finally operating on the assumption that she _hadn't_ experienced a psychotic breakdown that would make her act against everything she held dear...

* * *

  
"I got in the middle of a battle between two religious sects," Bones said as the two of them sat in her office with the rest of the squint squad- Goodman was absent, but he was generally more of an overseer at this point- later that night, charges dropped and the case concluded; the situation back in New Orleans might still be religiously complicated, but at least their role had concluded. "Benoit used Hurricane Katrina as a diversion to take the soul of a voodoo priest."

"And he killed his own daughter," Angela said grimly.

"Dark sorcerers suck, man," Hodgins noted.

"Oh, but, you know, he intended to bring her back to life," Booth added.

"There's not really any such thing as spells and magic," Zack said (If a situation ever arose where he had to tell at least some of the squints about magic, Booth _really_ hoped he wouldn't have to explain it to Zack; he wasn't sure he'd have the patience to get through the young man's fixation on his old facts, where Bones at least was willing to learn from everyone rather than just her specifically-acknowledge 'peers').

"What are you talking about?" Hodgins said, looking slightly incredulously at Zack. "He put a forgetting hex on Dr. Brennan."

"But it wasn't the spell that made me forget," Bones protested. "It was the drugs. Rohypnol."

"Blood test didn't find any," Booth reminded her.

"Gamma hydroxybutyrate?" Bones asked

"Not a trace," Booth confirmed.

"Sodium pentothal?" Bones suggested.

"Nope," Booth said again.

"Severe emotional trauma," Bones threw out.

"Honey, even I think you're too strong-minded for that," Angela said with a sympathetic smile.

"There were too many delays in doing my blood test," Bones continued without even a hint that she had needed to pause to think about her next answer. "That, plus the adrenaline of my escape... the drugs were out of my system."

"They put the voodoo on you, baby," Hodgins said, chuckling as Booth made a mock voodoo sign with his arms, before Hodgins' expression became more awkward as he took in Bones's reaction. "I... didn't really mean to call you 'baby'."

"You guys, stop it," Bones said firmly. " _Now_. I mean it."

"Do you believe in voodoo?" Zack asked. "Because even if a small part of you believes in it, then it has a grip."

"I do not believe," Bones said simply.

"Maybe just a little?" Booth asked, leaning over to look at her.

"No," Bones replied simply.

"Good," Booth said. "Because, you know, if you have any doubts, we'll just have Benoit send you back one of those little satanic mojo pouches from prison."

"Booth, objects have no intrinsic power," Bones said, looking firmly at him. "A person's future does not depend on some...thing. Things are just things. They do not have... magical meaning or powers."

The interesting thing about that statement was that it was one of those rare occasions where Booth could prove her wrong without revealing his past; objects like the Gem of Amarra or the Orb of Thessulah might have power on their own, but even simpler objects like the claddagh rings he and Buffy had exchanged so long ago had some deeper meaning behind them...

Opening his hand, he revealed the earring that he had acquired from the crime scene- the earring that was one of the few things his partner had left of her mother-, holding it casually in front of him as Bones stared at it.

"Where'd you get that?" she asked.

"What does it matter?" Booth said, as he placed the earring in her hand. "It's just a thing, right?"

Even as he walked out of the room to head for a warm bed after a very long day after only a few moments of conversation, he know that he'd made his point; even in a world without magic, some simple objects could still have some kind of power over others.


	21. The Graft in the Girl

As he walked through the hospital ward with Bones and Angela, booth wished that they could do this somewhere else; even without the unfair nature of the circumstances that had brought them here- society should be past the point where _kids_ faced death from disease-, he _never_ felt comfortable in these situations...

"Uh... Agent Booth?" Angela asked, even as they continued walking down the corridor.

"Yes, Angela?" Booth replied, already knowing that he wasn't going to like whatever she had to say to him; she never called him 'Agent Booth' when things were doing well.

"This is the paediatric cancer floor of the hospital," the forensic artist said.

"Yeah," Booth confirmed, wishing that she hadn't just said it like that.

After so long dealing with people getting killed by demons, facing death by ritual sacrifice, or variations of the above, the idea of people dying of natural causes was one aspect of humanity that he still had trouble with, probably because he'd had so little contact with it as Angel (Marcus's death by heart attack didn't count- after everything that bastard had done to innocent men to relive his own youth, his heart condition could have been considered just payback rather than simple time catching up with him-, and even when Joyce had died he'd only learned what had killed her second-hand, and there was always the possibility- even if he never liked to consider it- that Dawn's existence had contributed to her condition).

"Right," Angela said, briefly indicating her bag. "Well, uh, what I'm about to show Deputy Director Cullen is kinda gruesome."

"Why are we meeting Cullen here?" Bones asked, glancing up from the papers she'd been studying in a file.

"Because he's the deputy director of the FBI and this is where he wants us to show it to him," Booth said, only to be met with stares from the two women that made it clear they weren't going to accept that as the sole response.

"OK, listen," he said, looking awkwardly at them and hoping that Bones wouldn't over-analyse what he was about to tell her. "About a month ago his daughter Amy was diagnosed with cancer. Meso..."

"Mesothelioma," Bones clarified as they walked around a corner. "Lung cancer."

"Exactly," Booth said grimly. "So she's not doing so well, so it's a lot easier for us to come to him right now."

"Huh," Bones muttered, apparently to herself.

"Huh, what?" Booth asked, looking sharply over at Bones; he recognised that tone of voice, and it was _not_ one he wanted to hear in this kind of situation.

"Nothing," Bones said. "It's just that's an extremely rare form of lung cancer; odd for someone Amy's age to contract-"

"No, no, no," Booth said, turning sharply around to hold up a firm hand to stop the anthropologist going any further. "No probing, OK? Not to Cullen, not to his family. This will take five minutes; we go in, do the show and tell relating to the case and then we're out of there. Is that clear?"

"I just think it's peculiar-" Bones began.

"No," Booth said firmly.

"But I-" Bones protested.

"No," Booth interjected (Why was it she _still_ couldn't take a hint at times like this?).

"You have to admit-" Bones tried to say.

"Booth," Cullen's voice said, his tone clear as Booth turned to face his superior, dressed for once in a more casual woollen top rather than his usual suits. "Doctor Brennan. How appropriate, you two bickering in an adolescent wing."

"Uh, sir, yes," Booth said awkwardly; hopefully Cullen didn't know just _what_ they had been arguing about. "Um, is it OK if we come in, sir?"

"What do you think, sweetheart?" Cullen asked, calling back into the room to the young dark-haired girl sitting up in bed, sketching away.

"Booth's cool," the girl replied with a warm smile despite her condition. "Most of the time."

"You heard the lady," Cullen said, looking at Booth with a slightly resigned expression. "You're cool."

Somehow, even Bones's implied disbelief of that assessment didn't tarnish Booth's good feelings about that description of himself; after Dawn had mainly seemed to be impressed by him because of the 'vampire-fighting-his-instincts' angle of his existence, it was nice to hear that he could still be 'cool' to kids who only knew him as a human rather than anything else...

Then he reminded himself where they were, and chided himself for thinking about something like that in a hospital where children were _dying_.

God, he just wanted to be out of here and back to dealing with a killer that he could pummel into unconsciousness without being accused of police brutality...

* * *

  
"Your daughter's cancer originated in the bone graft," Bones explained, looking solemnly at Cullen as they stood in his office, Booth for once standing behind his superior's desk while Cullen himself paced around the office, clearly struggling to process the news they'd just revealed to him. "The test confirms it."

"It was the operation?" Cullen asked, looking in slight-but-significant shock at the two of them.

"Not only was the bone contaminated by malignancy, it was significantly older than documented," Bones continued (Booth wondered if her just _talking_ about it like that was her way of coping; he _knew_ that she wasn't insensitive to the whole experience).

"It-it was... expired or something?" Cullen asked, looking between them in confusion.

"No, sir," Booth clarified. "It just came from a much older donor."

"Someone in their sixties," Bones confirmed.

"Hospital error," Cullen said, letting out a brief sarcastic laugh.

"The next step would be to find out where the graft came from and how it slipped through the system," Booth said; he didn't understand most of what he'd learned from the squint squad about bone grafts, but judging by the squints' response to their discovery, he could be fairly sure something like this would have to be the result of far more than a filing mistake.

"This is not FBI jurisdiction," Cullen said, looking between them both as though trying to find something.

"It's a question of justice," Booth said grimly.

"Does this, in any way, change my daughter's prognosis?" Cullen asked, a slight tremor the only indication that what they were discussing was personally affecting him.

"No," Bones said, after a moment's pause.

"So she's still gonna die of this cancer?" Cullen said, the pain in his eyes one that Booth hoped he'd never have to experience himself; even when he had seen Connor die at Gunn's hands in Hell, he'd had hope that he could do _something_ to the cause of Connor's death even before he and Wesley had figured out how they could reverse it...

"Barring spontaneous remission... the likelihood is... significant," Bones replied after an uncertain pause; she might not always get why people felt the way they did, but she clearly wished that she could provide him with a better answer.

"The FBI's not my personal police force," Cullen said, looking down for a moment before he continued talking, his expression tight as though fighting to maintain control of it. "I appreciate what you discovered. Call Charlie Hammond, CDC, tell him what happened...he'll continue the investigation."

"My team can still-" Bones began as Cullen turned to leave.

"We'll notify CDC right away," Booth said, cutting Bones off; Cullen's trembling tone of voice towards the end made it clear that he wouldn't appreciate further discussion on this topic right now.

He might still be convinced that there was something more going on here than a simple mistake with inappropriate bone marrow, but they weren't going to get anywhere arguing with Cullen when he was trying to maintain some professional control.

Right now, he'd just have to take a few vacation days to find out more about this situation and allow the selfish part of himself to hope that he'd get those days back when they found what they were looking for.

* * *

  
As he walked into the coffin display area, Booth tried to restrain the urge to shudder; vampire stereotypes aside, coffins never failed to make him uncomfortable, ever since he'd dug his way out of his own one when he was Angelus.

As he'd told David's client during that whole mess with the memorial stone, he'd spent enough time in that one to know that he didn't want to go back; those things might look comfortable, but there was no way it could ever _be_ comfortable if you had to lie in one while you were still alive.

"What's this place?" he asked, looking around at the various coffins in shades of grey, white, brown or black (What was the _point_ in having a different colour of coffin; other people saw the things once and the 'user' generally never saw it themselves).

"Casket showroom," Bones responded. "They're having a sale."

"Well, it looks like a sick department store," Booth said, looking around the room briefly before turning to lead his partner out. "Alright, nobody would be cutting anybody up in this place; let's go."

"Whoa," Bones said, pointing at the other end of the room. "Wait; over there."

"What?" Booth asked, following the finger to where it pointed at the small grey thing sticking out of the wall at the other end. "It's a water line; what's the big deal?"

"But the floor slopes towards the centre of the room," Bones explained, looking around the room as she continued to speak. "This wasn't always used for a showroom. I wonder what's under the carpet... If body work was done in here," she explained, taking out a pocket knife and crouching down to cut out a piece of the carpet, "they'd need a drain."

"You're kidding me," Booth said, examining the familiar sight underneath the piece of carpet Bones had just cut away. "It's a drain?"

"This is our sales office," Martin the funeral director said, walking into the room behind them with an indignant glare. "There is nothing in here you need to see. The only thing in this room is caskets."

"I'm not so sure about that," Bones said, looking up at him briefly before walking off towards an air vent in an upper part of the room.

"No, what..." Martin asked, still glaring at her with the frustration of a man- in Booth's experience- who was trying too hard to convince people that he'd done nothing. "You are making a mistake."

"Am I?" Bones asked, closing a casket and climbing up on top of it to look at the vent more closely.

"She's ruining my merchandise," Martin protested.

"Come on, how much is that one?" Booth asked, indicating the coffin with a smile; how much could anyone charge for this kind of thing-?

"Seven thousand dollars," Martin replied.

"Bones, watch the scuff marks," Booth said, privately wondering why anyone would pay that much for a coffin; he'd heard of dying in comfort, and could understand people wanting to ensure that their loved ones' last days were relaxing, but where was the point in spending that much money on something that would probably get cremated or just left in the earth to rot?

"Mr. Martin, this room is designed to be washed clean," Bones explained, turning to face them as she indicated the room around them. "You've got drains in the floor. I think this is where you did the bone harvesting. When you thought we were coming back, you moved everything around."

"That's absurd; I did no such thing," Martin said, as Bones grabbed a mask and swab from her bag before resuming her work.

"You're an excellent house cleaner, but in the carpeting and tidying up, you forgot about one thing," she said, opening the air vent and swabbing the inside before she examined the result. "Bone dust. You forgot about airborne particles."

 _Jackpot_ , Booth thought to himself, smiling in satisfaction at the awkward look on Martin's face.

They might not have a confession from the guy yet, but they sure as hell had enough to bring him in for questioning (Although why someone who sold merchandise worth that much felt that he needed _more_ money Booth didn't get; what was wrong with just being comfortable rather than opulent?)...

* * *

  
As he sat opposite Martin in the interrogation room, Booth wondered how Cullen was coping with this situation; the fact that he was actually watching the interrogation said a great deal about the kind of personal investment he had in this case, but it couldn't exactly be easy to be so certain that they were facing the person who'd essentially killed his daughter.

Even if Martin hadn't played as direct a role in Amy's potentially imminent death as Holtz had played in Connor's corruption, it still wasn't something that it was really easy to accept...

"How much money have you made over the years doing this, Nick?" he asked, glaring at the man before him; even if he hadn't been performing the operations, the man had still provided the bodies that had caused this problem in the first place, to say nothing of the operating theatre where the samples had been taken. "Tens... oh, hundreds of thousands of dollars."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Martin replied (Why this guy thought that would work after everything they'd discovered so far Booth had no idea; there was no way anyone could perform those kind of operations in his building without him knowing it unless he was so thick he made Cordelia and Xander at their worst look like MENSA candidates).

"William Hastings had an aggressive form of cancer that was very rare," Booth said, taking care to maintain physical control even as he allowed his voice to reveal his anger at the other man's actions. "You made some pocket change off his grafts, you didn't even tell his wife. Now a bunch of people are sick; two died. You're looking at multiple counts of murder."

"I didn't kill anybody," Martin replied.

"No, no, you didn't kill anybody," Booth admitted, even as the contempt in his voice remained; trying to cut corners to make money in such a risky manner might not be illegal in itself, but it wasn't exactly reassuring for the families that had trusted this guy to show some respect to their loved ones. "I mean, they were already dead; you were just recycling."

"I didn't do anything wrong," Martin said, his voice still frustratingly 'in control' for someone in his position even if they were definitely getting him on-edge with their current line of questioning.

"Do you have any doctor training?" Booth asked; maybe the change of topic would put the guy off-balance enough to make a mistake.

"No," Martin replied.

"Spend any time in the service as a medic or a nurse?" Booth continued.

"No," Martin replied again.

"No?" Booth repeated, indicating the file in his hands as he continued to speak. "Then who did the cutting? Who did the cutting of the grafts, huh? Somebody knew what they were doing. Your phone records show that during the months around Hastings' death you received dozens of calls from disposable cells. Four different ones, huh? What do you make of that?" he concluded, slamming the file down onto the table.

"I don't recall this," Martin said, looking at the file with a dismissive angle that only increased Booth's anger towards the man; even with the evidence piling up, he was still desperately lying like a child trying to get himself out of trouble, simply denying everything rather than trying to present any kind of cover story...

"You know what?" Booth said, glaring at the man as he leaned over the table. "The dust that we got off the vent in your showroom matched Hastings and seven other bodies. Who do you work with?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Martin replied.

"I think you do," Booth said, glaring coldly at the man who continued to deny his role in the deaths of innocent people simply because he'd wanted to make some quick money. "I think you and your partners knew that the bones were cancerous, and you didn't-"

"Who was it, huh?" Cullen said, the door slamming open as he walked into the room, glaring at Martin. "Who the hell did this to my daughter?"

Before Booth or Martin could say anything, Cullen had picked Martin up and slammed him against the wall, control a forgotten thing as he roared his further requests for the identity of the person who'd torn his family apart...

Even as Booth struggled to get Cullen to move away before he did something he'd regret later, he knew all too well what kind of pain was motivating the other man; hadn't he done the same thing to Wesley when he'd abducted Connor?

He might have confidence that they'd find this bastard's partner eventually, but what good would that do Cullen when he and his wife would still lose their daughter at the end of it all?


	22. The Soldier on the Grave

As he walked through the graveyard where their latest victim had been discovered, Booth wondered how he should feel about the fact that he felt a connection with all these graves here even when he'd only briefly fought in _this_ kind of war himself.

It wasn't like he hadn't spent his life fighting anyway, but that was fighting demons and magic-wielders in a secret conflict that so many people in the world would never know about that you could imagine was 'restricted' to the task where you were playing your part; these guys went out to fight a war on a scale that make it virtually impossible for any individual to make a difference, and yet they kept on trying...

"I never get used to the magnitude of this place," he said, looking at the graves around them as he and Bones walked to their crime scene. "What it's taken to keep this country free..."

"All societies build monuments to their dead," Bones responded. "To convince future combatants that it's an honour to die in battle."

"For these servicemen, it was," Booth said, his tone quiet but firm; he didn't have to have fought alongside them for all of the battles that he remembered to believe in what they stood for. "And somebody to use this place to protest the war just pisses me off. These are the lives that gave them the right; these men... they should be respected."

"If they were really respected, maybe not so many of them would be buried here," Bones said, as they walked among the FBI team already gathered around the scene.

"Are we going to get into something here, Bones?" Booth asked, glaring briefly at her.

"I don't see why," Bones replied. "I think we both wish this place were a lot smaller."

Even as the other agent led them over to where the body they'd come here to investigate had been discovered, Booth couldn't shake the feeling he'd felt when Bones had made that statement.

The soldiers in the war he'd been a part of for most of his existence might not be buried here, but in the end, Bones was right; when you got down to it, both of them wished that the graveyards were smaller...

Then he saw the body lying on top of the grave beyond the crime scene tape, and thoughts of the past were forgotten in face of what was now in front of them, the assessment of the body just background detail.

Even if he hadn't fought in the same kind of war as these men had for this length of time, the fact remained that people should _not_ show this kind of disrespect to those who gave their lives for something...

"...wouldn't he have left a note?" Bones asked, drawing his attention away from his private reflection and back to the present.

"Didn't need to," he said, as Bones pulled on her gloves, recalling the files he'd received about this case as he leaned over to look at the body. "It's on Charlie Kent's grave; press was coming out to do a tribute to him for the one-year anniversary of his death."

"Charlie Kent?" Bones asked, as she shone one of her strange torches on the body (It probably helped her look for something, but Booth couldn't be sure what).

"He was in the National Guard," Booth replied. "About to be drafted by the NBA when he got shipped out to Iraq. He gave his life taking out a group of insurgents to save his unit; won the silver star."

"It's male," Bones said; she had still been examining the body while he spoke. "African descent. Approximately 20-29 years old. Too early to determine cause of death."

"I'm not a pro, but I'm guessin' fire," Booth said, cursing at himself even before Bones turned to look at him; after some of the stuff he'd seen as Angel, he should know that just because a body was dead and badly burned didn't mean that it was in that condition because of the fire.

"The White House and the DOD want an ID as soon as possible," the agent who'd shown them to the body said.

"So they can brand him as a traitor," Bones finished.

"Why do you have to be so cynical?" Booth asked; as much as he appreciated his partner's honesty, like Cordelia in Sunnydale, she needed to learn the value of tact at times.

"I'm not cynical," Bones said, as she stood up to walk around to examine the remains from the other side. "It's a necessary psychology of warfare. Heroes and villains; without clear distinctions like that, we'd never be able to fight."

"Yeah, well," Booth said. "I always found being shot at... was a motivating factor."

As he glanced off to the side, his gaze fell onto the name of a nearby grave, and his earlier thoughts were lost at the sight of the name on the grave.

 _James Richards_.

His military career might be a mixture of real and fake- most of it was all just artificial memories as far as his presence in the conflict was concerned, even if he knew that the people he remembered meeting had been real-, but that didn't mean that he didn't empathise with the people who made a choice to take up the fight when they had to.

Seeing this grave... so close to where something so terrible and pointless had taken place...

"What?" Bones asked, breaking into his train of thought as she walked under the crime scene tape to stand beside him.

"It's Jamie Richards," Booth said, indicating the grave; he was peripherally aware of Zach picking stuff up from around the crime scene, but this was more important right now, and it wasn't like the kid didn't know what not to do on his own. "We were in the Rangers together. He was hit by a roadside bomb... just outside the green zone. He left... a wife... and two kids. The fact that he was near this..."

"You believe, somehow, he's still here, watching?" Bones asked.

"Yeah," Booth replied, swallowing slightly, trying to fight down his reaction; a part of him knew that he was exaggerating his own feelings over Richards' death because he couldn't express his grief over the death of his friends as Angel without too many questions, but even without that Richards' death still sucked. "You don't. I get that."

"I know you think he's a good man," Bones said, as he crouched down in front of the grave. "That's... that's enough for me."

Somehow, that simple sentence improved Booth's mood more than anything else Bones could have said; the thought that someone trusted his judgement to the point that they assumed that someone he regarded as a good man would _have_ to be a good man...

After the suspicion he'd occasionally received back when he was Angel and talking about some of the contacts he'd made back then, it made a refreshing change for people to regard his old acquaintances as good people simply because he judged them as such.

* * *

  
"The victim had lamb about an hour before his death," Hodgins said, studying some kind of tissue sample as Booth walked into the lab. "Of course, it's a little overcooked now."

"Toasted himself," Booth said, as he walked over to the table. "Who cares what he ate?"

"Just doing our jobs, Booth," Bones said, from where she was currently examining the victim alongside Zach.

"Big boys telling you to sweep this one under the rug?" Hodgins asked casually.

"Just can the left-wing conspiracy, Hodgins," Booth said, pointing at the body as he spoke. "Probably one of your nut-ball friends here on the table."

"Don't think so," Hodgins replied with a slight smile. "Fabric found at the scene was cotton with synthetic polymers. Dye: olive green. This dude was wearing a military uniform; he's one of yours, not mine."

Even if Booth consciously knew that even that statement wasn't entirely accurate given the length of time he'd actually served in the army, that didn't make him feel any better; those men might have never technically been his colleagues, but that didn't mean that he didn't admire their willingness to fight for what they believed in...

"OK," Angela said, from her position studying a screen behind him. "His name is Devon Marshall; he served in the Guard with Kent."

"What?" Booth said, looking sharply around at the artist's newest revelation.

"He was there in Mosul the night Kent was killed," Angela explained, the computer screen in front of her displaying Marshall's military record.

"He was protesting?" Zack asked, still standing beside the body even as Bones walked over to look at the screen with him and Angela.

"Marshall could've had a chance of heart," Hodgins said, his tone slightly dismissive in a manner that Booth didn't appreciate. "It's not like support for the war is increasing."

"It also could've been survivor's guilt," Booth said, glaring back at the entomologist. "The guy who saved his life didn't make it; you can't imagine what it's like carrying that around."

"I don't think so, Booth," Bones said, looking awkwardly at him before she walked back over to the body to indicate a hole in the skull. "There's evidence of damage on the external auditory meatus, here and here."

"I'm sorry, you know, but I left my phrase book at home," Booth said, turning around with a frustrated glare.

"The opening in the skull where the auditory nerves feed into the brain," Zack clarified.

"So we're talking ear hole?" Booth said, not even bothering to hide his exasperation; honestly, even Giles or Wesley at their worst had been willing to phrase things simply rather than constantly using the longest word possible to describe whatever they were talking about...

"Yes," Bones said as she looked back at him.

"They simplify these words for a reason, people," Booth said, looking in frustration at the group around him; he _knew_ that they were smart, so why did they seem to feel the need to emphasise that at times?

"Something was jabbed into his ear," Bones confirmed, her voice slightly slower than normal.

"OK, that's clear, but why?" Booth asked.

"There's scrapings within the cranium and marks on the inside of the parietal and occipital," Bones continued. "Whatever was used was pushed completely through his skull."

"Someone scrambled his brain, then set the fire so there'd be no tissue left to see what had been done," Hodgins said, wincing slightly at his summary of events.

"Exactly," Bones said, looking from Hodgins to Booth. "Devon Marshall didn't die in the fire. He was murdered first."

Even the knowledge that this wasn't a protest statement couldn't make Booth feel any better now that he knew he was dealing with a murderer.

* * *

  
"Jimmy loved that guy," Booth said as they walked away from the shaken young soldier; he'd known that the war was bad, but even with his own experience as a soldier before he returned and joined the FBI, it was still sometimes only possible to really understand what war could be like when he saw people in that kind of condition. "He didn't kill him."

"Now you're a mind reader?" Bones said, raising her eyebrows sceptically.

"Maybe," Booth replied, trying to lighten the mood even if he couldn't bring himself to smile when making even such a weak joke. "You want me to guess your weight?"

"You do and you could lose a tooth," Bones replied- he thought that she was joking, but given the neutral delivery he couldn't be sure- before she continued on the original topic. "Booth, you've got to stay objective. Jimmy was one of the last people to see Devon alive. He admitted they went to the cemetery. Jimmy could've killed him."

"Oh, here we go," Booth said; for someone who liked facts, Bones was getting good at this part of detective work. "I thought you didn't like speculation?"

"I don't; that's why I took this," Bones said, pulling an object out of her pocket and showing it to him. "Cigarette butt; see if we can pull any DNA from it and match it to anything he left on Devon."

"Right," Booth countered. "If you got what you need, then why are you giving me such grief?"

"Because I thought you could've been a little tougher in there," Bones said, placing a restraining hand on his arm as he moved to walk away, pulling him back to face her.

"I'm tough," Booth countered, wishing he would take that statement back as soon as he'd voiced it; what was it about being human that made him regress to start acting like Xander Harris of all people when he was under stress?

"Most of the time," Bones said, in a nonchalant manner that nobody would have completely believed.

"Do you always have to get the last word in?" Booth asked, chuckling slightly at her statement.

"I like to, yeah," Bones replied.

"Booth!" another voice said before the ex-vampire in question could say anything, prompting him to turn around and look at the grey-haired man rolling towards them in a wheelchair. "Son of a bitch."

"Hey, Hank!" Booth said, smiling warmly at the other man; their 'real' time together might have been brief, but Hank was one of the people he'd really bonded with when he'd first been dropped into his new life as Booth, and it was always nice to meet up with the people who, even if they hadn't known it, had helped him adapt to being human again. "How the hell are ya, man?"

"Great," Hank replied, with a casual smile. "Just got some new wheels."

"Sweet ride, man," Booth replied (That was one thing he'd always admired about Hank; even after losing his legs, the man didn't give up and brood), as he indicated his partner. "Hank Lutrell, Doctor Temperance Brennan."

"The bone lady," Hank said, smiling as he shook Bones's hand.

"That's me," Bones replied, a slightly wry look on her face as she looked at Hank.

"I heard you two were working together," Hank said, looking at Booth with an approving smile before he addressed Bones. "Booth and I were in the same unit in Kosovo. Hey," he said, turning his attention back to Booth, "you gotta come over for dinner. Janie and the kids keep asking about you."

"Yeah, I'd love to," Booth said. "I'll call; we'll, uh, make a date, OK?"

"Great," Hank smiled. "I gotta role; I've got to be in court at 3:00."

"Yeah," Booth said.

"They can't start without the judge," Hank said as he turned around.

"I'll call," Booth added, patting Hank briefly on the shoulder as the other man rolled away, picking up the front wheels of his chair as he turned around to address Booth directly.

"Hey, call me or I'm gonna kick your ass," Hank called back before he turned again and rolled off down a corridor, leaving Booth to sigh at his departure.

After that meeting with Jimmy, it was always good to know that _some_ people had managed to cope after their losses in the war...

"What happened to him?" Bones asked.

"He got hurt," Booth said, deciding to leave it at that.

As much as he respected Hank's ability to adapt to his handicap, he _really_ didn't want to hear Bones going on about whatever she might have to say about the injuries Hank had sustained or their long-term implications or crap like that...

* * *

  
Staring at the various items gathered in front of him, Booth tried not to think too much about the body lying on the morgue table behind him; this whole situation might be necessary to get at the truth, but that didn't mean he had to like it.

"You know," he said, picking up one of the medals in a probably foolish attempt to take his mind off what they were about to do- why was it that Kent's body looked so comparatively fresh after being buried for a year?-, "this is a Silver Star."

"I know how much you hate this, Booth," Bones said, her tone soft as she looked back at him.

"Let's just... get this over with, all right?" Booth said, swallowing as he put the medal back with its fellows.

"OK," Bones said, as she turned to address Zack and Hodgins, "I want a full set of X-rays, and a clear picture of all fracture patterns, and a tox screen and analysis of any particulates in the wound."

"DOD wants this done fast," Goodman said solemnly. "They want this out of the press as soon as possible."

"It will take the time it takes to do it properly," Bones said, before she turned her attention to Angela. "Can you run scenarios on the angles and the entry order of the shots?"

"Yeah," Angela said, glancing over the photos. "I should be able to give you something."

"I know we don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff," Hodgins said, as he walked over to pick a tray of instruments close to where Booth was standing, "because you know, politically, I think we live in an Orwellian nightmare due to-"

"What are you trying to say?" Booth said, folding his arms and glaring at Hodgins.

"Just... I'm sorry, man," Hodgins said, nodding awkwardly at Booth. "I really am."

Even as Hodgins walked away, Booth had to admit that he appreciated the entomologist's awkward effort; no matter how uncomfortable the other man made him at times- the guy's resemblance to one of the staff at Wolfram & Hart had always left him slightly on-edge, even if he knew that there was no connection between the two men-, when it counted, Hodgins _was_ a good man.

"I'll need X-rays of L-1 through four, and the left scapula," Bones said, as Booth turned away from the uniform and medals to stand at the head of the table where Kent's body currently lay.

"He's just a kid..." Booth reflected, wondering if it sounded as weak to Bones as it did to him; after his time in Sunnydale alone, he knew that youth was no guarantee of safety from death and murder, but that didn't make it any easier to accept people dying this young in an era when the diseases that had threatened his youth were virtually wiped out.

"It's always the young," Bones said, looking up from the body as she spoke. "Anthropologists have theorized that wars break out when there's an increase in the population of unmarried men under the age of 25."

Looking over at his partner, Booth found himself fighting the urge to attack a friend in a way that he hadn't felt since he first faced Wesley after Connor's abduction; the idea that she could just reduce war to... _statistics_ like that...

"I'm sorry," Bones said, her awkward tone dispelling all thoughts of violence as she looked awkwardly at him. "I need to create a distance from the victim. It's how I deal. I- I didn't mean-"

"Just... you know, do what you have to do," Booth said. "I'm going to go do my thing."

It probably wasn't the best time for him to just walk off, but with there being nothing left for him to do here, he was going to try and see if the other members of the unit could give them any answers.

* * *

  
"Look at the two of us," Hank said as he smiled at Booth from the other side of the table, the current meal providing Booth with a welcome if subtle break from the case (Hank might have been in the army but he wasn't involved in _this_ case). "You with a badge, me in the courtroom; both trying to find justice, eh?"

"That's why we fought, right?" Booth said.

"That's what they told us," Hank replied with a brief shrug.

"What?" Booth said, looking at Hank inquiringly. "You don't believe it?"

"Sure I do; you don't look like you do," Hank said, his slight smile faltering as another thought occurred to him. "You're not gambling again, are ya?"

"No, man," Booth said (That was one part of the human condition he'd never expected; a part of him wondered if his past life as a vampire had just left him 'inclined' to find something else to be addicted to at first, but he'd dismissed that as excessive 'paranoia' after he'd gotten over it). "No, I've been good, you know; I've been going to my meetings... I haven't even played a game of Monopoly."

It didn't take him long to come to a decision about what to do next; with a case like this, he needed to voice his frustrations to _someone_ before they built up...

"Listen, Hank," he said, his voice lowering as he spoke. "I got this case, Charles Kent... It's friendly fire."

"Oh, God," Hank said, wincing at the implications.

"Yeah," Booth said. "Covered up. Two of the members of the squad are dead. One murdered. You know, whatever went down must've been pretty ugly."

The solemn shake of the head Hank gave Booth in response to that revelation was enough confirmation for Booth that his friend understood his point.

For the moment, he wasn't Seeley Booth, ex-army sniper and current FBI agent, wondering about the point of his past military service; he was Angel, former vampire Champion of the Powers That Be, wondering whether the cause that he'd dedicated himself to for the last few years of his vampiric existence had actually been worth it, even if he'd received his humanity back as a result...

"You know, Hank," he said, awkwardly thinking over the best way to say this without admitting the truth about himself. "You know what, uh... you know what we did..."

"Don't go there, Booth," Hank said, shaking his head in a conciliatory manner.

"Was it worth it?" Booth asked. "I mean, look at you."

"You saved my life," Hank replied casually. "I got a great family because of you."

"Yeah," Booth said (At least _that_ part of his history in the army was real; he was never sure how to feel when discussing things that had happened before he 'became' Booth. "But, I mean, why was it always a secret?"

"We were given a choice," Hank replied firmly. "They always gave us a choice."

"Yeah," Booth replied, "but that last time..."

"Well, you knew what was at stake," Hank said, looking sympathetically at Booth.

"Yeah..." Booth said, nodding grimly at the memory; even with a soul, there were some things he'd done that he wished he could forget.

"You never talked to anybody about it?" Hank said, leaning in closer to address Booth in a lower voice.

Booth could only shake his head at that; talking about Angelus's crimes was one thing, but Faith seeing him drink that doughnut shop guy during her 'mind-walk' was more than enough for him as far as sharing the guilty secrets of his past went.

"You've got to," Hank said. "How about your girlfriend? That doctor?"

"Nah," Booth said firmly. "No, she's- you know, she's just my partner."

He didn't want to pursue this particular line of thought; it made everything _far_ too complicated...

"You know, look, I got work," he said, seizing on the first excuse for his departure that he could think of without appearing too rude. "I should go."

"Sure," Hank said, clearly just humouring Booth's sudden desire to depart. "Uh, we're on for Sunday dinner, right?"

"Yeah," Booth said, nodding briefly at the question.

"OK," Hank replied, clearly stuck for anything else he could say now.

"See you Sunday," Booth said, before he turned and walked off, leaving Hank to stare after him, cursing his own difficulty at opening up.

There were times when he _really_ wished he could relax more than he did; having someone to talk to about some of the crap in his life would make things easier, but he just found it so hard to find someone he felt comfortable confiding in...

* * *

  
As he burst through the door, his eyes automatically focusing on Captain Fuller as he stood behind his desk, Booth could barely restrain his rage.

People dying for a cause was one thing, but people dying because some moron screwed up, and then the _bastard_ refused to take responsibility for his mistake...

It was worse than the time he'd learned that Faith had tried to frame Buffy for killing Finch; at least Faith had the excuse of being a traumatised girl who didn't know how to cope with responsibility because she'd never had any before becoming the Slayer.

"You son of a bitch!" Booth yelled, grabbing Fuller and slamming him against the cabinet. "You covered up the whole thing!"

"Stand down, Agent Booth!" Fuller began to protest.

"They were innocent!" Booth countered, refusing to listen to the other man's words; never had he been more grateful not to be in the army any more when faced with scum like this who lied about the actions of others to redeem their own names.

"I don't know what you've heard, but my report clearly states -" Fuller tried to protest.

"We've taken your report apart!" Booth said, Angela's reconstruction and his own observations leaving no room for doubt in his mind as to what had really taken place during that dark day. "We have the _facts_ , Captain; your squad blew away a family of innocents!"

"Kent!" Fuller yelled. "Kent did!"

Realising that the other man was at least willing to talk, Booth relaxed his grip and stepped back, staring silently at Fuller as he spoke.

"A kid so green he never should have been there in the first place," Fuller continued. "Do you know what that town was like? Our guys were being blown up by I.E.D.'s every day while we were trying to build hospitals and schools. A mistake was made. No one likes it. But you know what happens; if it got out what we did in that neighbourhood, the whole damn city would've exploded. What would you have done? Would you have let the city burn? This can't come out, Agent Booth. Don't make this any harder with an ugly story like this."

"I don't know what you're fighting for, Fuller, but it sure as hell wasn't my country," Booth said, pulling out his handcuffs as he glared at the other man; fine reasons didn't help when peoples' lives had been lost because of the mess he'd created. "We'll start with obstruction of justice."

"You have no jurisdiction on this base-" Fuller began with an angry leer.

"But we do, Captain," Colonel Shore said, the officer who'd shown him and Bones in walking in through the room's external door- he'd just waited outside to give Booth the chance to get an independent confession out of Fuller-, "and we're cooperating fully with Agent Booth. You will not disgrace us, Captain. You will be held accountable."

As he turned Fuller around to place the cuffs on him, Booth resisted the urge to slap the cuffs on with just a bit more force than he would have done in normal circumstances; the man might have disgraced the uniform and army to conceal a mistake, but Booth had to remind himself that assaulting the prisoner would just result in more trouble later.

* * *

  
"I never would have expected to see that," Bones said, staring after the Marshalls and the Kents as they walked away from the funeral, the two families sharing a moment in the memory of the loss of their loved ones.

"Well, people will always surprise you," Booth said, smiling slightly at the memory of some of the incidents he'd witnessed in the past; Doyle's heroic sacrifice to save the Listers, Xander taking a gambit to save Buffy's life- he still regretted not going to confront the Master himself, but after Buffy's rejection of her destiny he'd assumed that the Master was just going to be left where he was-, Cordelia's ever-increasing courage in Los Angeles...

"That hasn't always been my experience," Bones reflected, still staring after the family.

"I've... done some things," Booth said after a moment's pause; this might not be the best moment for what he had to say, but he doubted that he'd get a better one any time soon.

"I know," Bones said after a moment's silence, looking sympathetically at him.

"No," Booth said, forcing down the tremor in his voice at the memory. "No, you don't."

"But it's OK," Bones said.

"Not- not as a secret, it's not," Booth said, sitting down on one of the chairs that had been set up for the funeral; what he was about to say would be easier to say sitting down. "I have to be, uh, honest about myself... I-I have to be able to tell someone."

"You will in time, Booth," Bones said, as she sat down alongside him. "You will."

It was in the moments when she looked at him like that- that look of uncertain compassion, wanting to care for him without know how to really do it properly-, that made Booth wish that he could be more honest with this woman who'd lost so much at such a young age...

"I was sent to Kosovo," he said at last, picking a story that he could at least honestly tell her. "There was this... Serb General, Raddick, who led a unit who would go into villages and, you know, destroy 'em. Women, children, all- all killed because he wanted to ethnically purify his country. He'd done this twice before. I mean, we had facts, proof. 232 people just erased..."

He paused for a moment to collect himself- he'd killed more as Angelus, but never that many at one time; sometimes, humans really were the greatest monsters- before he continued, still fighting down the tears at the memory. "I was the sniper sent in to stop him. He was set to leave in a couple hours. It was his son's... son's birthday. A little boy maybe about six or seven. I can still hear the music from the party, you know? That song just playing in my head. Nobody knew where the shot came from, but, you know, they knew why it came. They said I saved over a hundred people. But, you know, that little boy... who didn't know who his father was, who... who just loved him... he saw him die, fall to the ground, right in front of him. That little boy, all covered in his daddy's blood, was changed forever..."

It was moments like that which had helped him realise that he needed to get out of his career as a sniper; using his skills to eliminate human enemies who operated on that kind of scale was important, but it just wasn't something he could bring himself to do...

"It's never just..." he began, sighing before he resolutely continued his sentence. "It's never just the one person who dies, Bones. Never. Never."

As Bones reached over to place a comforting hand on his forearm, Booth sniffed slightly; he wasn't sure what it was, but ever since he became human, he'd felt more of a freedom to cry when dealing with moments like this...

"You know... we all die a little bit, Bones," he said, his head lowered as he stared at where their hands met on his arm, grateful for whatever awkward comfort she had to provide. "With each shot, we all die a little."

It was a complicated statement, but it was also true; you couldn't kill someone without that action affecting others beyond those who had died, and he knew the truth of that statement in _so_ many ways...


	23. The Woman in Limbo

As he walked into the Angelator room, Booth wondered if he should feel amused or exasperated at Bones's inability to get ready; it might be annoying that she would take this long to get ready for court due to work, but at the same time, it was one of those little quirks that just made her Bones rather than anyone else.

"Any of you seen Bones?" he asked, looking over at the others. "We're due in court, like- Hello- now."

His voice trailed off as he noted the expressions on Zach, Angela and Goodman's faces as they stood around the Angelator; they might be confused about something, but they were clearly also very concerned about it. "What?"

"This totally freaked her out," Angela said, tapping a few controls on the Angelator to bring up the semi-transparent image of-

Booth's blood ran cold.

He _knew_ that woman.

He might have only seen her photograph, but it was a photograph he'd studied as much as possible once Bones had officially asked him to look into the case, his time divided between studying their files and following up a few old leads; with all that to take into account, it was unlikely he'd ever forget it.

He barely registered Zach's 'input' as he picked up his phone and dialled a number that would at least deal with the obvious complications caused by this discovery; there wasn't anything that Zach could contribute to this situation that would be relevant right now, and Bones needed to focus before she'd be good for anything else.

"Yeah," he said, responding to the questions on the other end of the line without even fully registering what the person on the other end was saying; there were more important matters to worry about right now than the fine details of a conversation where he already knew exactly what he was going to say to the person on the other end. "You're gonna want to take Dr. Brennan off the witness list today... No... She can't make it into court. Thanks."

"Alright," Angela said, looking uncertainly at him, "what's going on?"

"That," Booth said, indicating the image as he terminated the phone call, "is Christine Brennan."

"Good God," Goodman said, staring at the image being projected in front of him.

"You just found Bones's mother," Booth said, looking over at Zach in particular to ensure that he understood what they had just done.

This might be the first significant progress that anyone had made in the case of Matthew and Christine's mysterious disappearance almost two decades ago- at least now they knew where _one_ of the two was-, but there was no denying that it sucked...

It was like a more realistic version of what had happened with him and Connor after Holtz stole him, really; seeing Connor again after he'd accepted that he would never be able to recover his son had been a surprise, but the fact that he'd aged so quickly in such a short amount of time had been the real shock.

For Bones, even if she'd probably been expecting to find her parents' bodies for years, nothing could realistically prepare you for the moment when you actually definitively learned that your mother was dead, and had probably been that way for years judging by the fact that Christine didn't seem that much older than the last photograph he'd been shown of her.

Without waiting to see what else anyone had to say about this discovery, Booth turned and headed for Bones's office, walking through the door to find his partner sitting at her desk staring at a small piece of blackened metal attached to what looked like a strip of brown leather in her hand, various plastic bags lying on the desk in front of her that must have come from the brown envelope off to the side.

"I have to miss court," Bones said, not even looking up at him as she stared at the object in her hand.

"I know," Booth said, briefly contemplating and discarding the idea of telling her that he'd already made the relevant arrangements to accommodate that request; there was no point going into that kind of detail right now.

"I remember this belt buckle," Bones said, still staring at the object in her hand. "I borrowed it without asking first day of high school. My father had it specially made for my mother because she loved dolphins."

"Bones..." Booth said, looking sympathetically at his partner, wishing that he had more to offer than inadequate regrets; he knew from experience that there were some wounds you never really recovered from. "I'm sorry."

"I always knew that, for my parents to disappear like that," Bones said, pausing briefly before she continued to speak as she turned to face him, "they... they had to be dead. I thought that when it was confirmed, I'd feel relief, but-"

"It's still bad news," Booth said.

He knew how she felt; even after he'd regained his memory of Angelus's sins, a part of him had spent some time after he'd 'woken up' in that gypsy camp with his soul restored to him that everything he remembered was just a disturbing and overly-detailed dream from a serious drinking binge, before he'd found himself facing the realities of the world that now existed around him as evidence that time had passed between his encounter in the alley and the moment in the camp...

"You have the file, Zack?" Bones asked, prompting Booth to turn around and see Zack standing in the door of Bones's office, looking awkwardly at his teacher.

"Jane Doe, Number 129-0998," Zack said, handing Bones what had to be her mother's file.

"Where was she found?" Bones asked, her voice back under control once again.

"Bones, I-" Booth began.

"What does it say?" Bones said, still staring intently at Zack; evidently that brief earlier breakdown was all that she would allow herself.

"'In September of 1998'," Zack read from the file, "'a grave-digging crew at the Sunset Memory Cemetery in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, uncovered human remains in a completely advanced stage of decomposition'."

"Is it from a grave?" Booth asked.

"No," Zack replied. "It appears that somebody just dug a hole at the edge of the cemetery and... plopped the body in there."

"Zack..." Booth said, glaring at the younger man as Bones looked back at the table with a slight tremor in her expression that was almost certainly all that she'd allow herself to show.

Even if this wasn't Bones's mother that they were talking about right now, there was no reason to be so blunt about the way someone had so cold-bloodedly disposed of a woman's body; the fact that it _was_ Bones's mother just made it more important that he recognise the emotional implications of what he was saying.

"Sorry," Zack said, before he turned his attention back to the file and began to scan through the pages in his hands. "The local coroner found no obvious evidence of foul play and sent the remains, a few artefacts and soil samples to the Jeffersonian, hoping we could identify her. Technically, your mother's been at the Jeffersonian as long as you have."

"Zack," Booth said, glaring at the young man; his casual delivery of such personal information wasn't doing anything to help Bones deal with this latest bombshell that she was never going to see her mother again.

"Sorry," Zack said, his voice lower before he continued speaking at a normal volume. "But they both got here in 1998."

"Doctor Brennan," Goodman said as he entered the office, looking sympathetically at her. "Miss Montenegro has volunteered to drive you home."

"Temperance," Booth said, knowing without needing to think about it that this was one of those times when it would be best to use her name. "Go home."

There wasn't much that he could do in this kind of situation, but he could make sure that she had a chance to process it in private before they dived back into the investigation...

* * *

  
"Are we on the look-out for anything in particular?" one of the FBI techs asked as Booth took in the team that had been assembled to look at the Brennans' abandoned car amid the chaos of the FBI garage.

"Treat it like a brand new crime scene," Booth said; if they were re-opening the case, they were going to do it properly. "Full workup. Tear through the whole car, treat it, and then go through it with a fine-tooth comb."

"That's our old car, all right," Russ said, looking at the battered blue vehicle with a wistful expression as the technicians began to remove the boot cover from the back.

"The name of my school is scraped off; Woodside Elementary," Bones said, noting a yellow sticker with red writing on it on the back of the car before she walked over to him as he stood at a nearby table. "They said they didn't find anything in the car."

"There was a bloodstain, front seat, passenger side," Booth said, scanning over a file he'd received earlier before he turned to address the crew, giving a brief whistle to attract their attention. "Guys! Everybody! I need the space! Now!"

"What, now?" one of the technicians asked, looking up from the passenger side of the car in surprise.

"Yeah, now," Booth replied, the stare on his face making it clear that he wasn't kidding.

"Take five, everybody," the technician said, calling over to the others before the group began to walk away, leaving Booth alone by the car with the Brennans.

"Twice in two days," Bones said, looking curiously at Booth.

"I had NCIC database check for a married couple who disappeared in 1978," Booth said, already knowing that there was no way Bones would take what he was about to tell her well but knowing that he had to as he pulled out the mug shots and passed the photographs to Bones. "Meet Max and Ruth Keenan."

"That's Mom and Dad all right," Russ said, as he looked at the photos from over his sister's shoulder.

"The NCIC database?" Bones said, looking at Booth in shocked confusion. "That's... that's criminals. My parents were on the list of federal offenders?"

"How do you like that?" Russ said, in a casual tone that Booth personally felt was highly inappropriate given the currently-tense situation. "I guess a criminal nature runs in the family."

"You were seven years old, Russ," Bones said, picking up a picture of herself and Russ as she glared at him. "Old enough to remember. What- what is your real name? What is _my_ real name?"

"Bones, it's right here in the file-" Booth began, seizing on a chance to save Russ from having to answer that question and confirming what Bones had just suddenly decided was true.

"No!" Bones said, her tone brokering no room for argument before she focused her glare back on Russ. "No! I want him to tell me! What is my real name, Russ?"

As Russ looked awkwardly around the garage, Booth briefly thought about asking Bones to calm down, but quickly scratched that as a possible course of action; the guy had had plenty of opportunities to tell Bones about this kind of information of his own accord, and he hadn't done it.

Maybe this situation wasn't fitting punishment for what he'd done, but it was more than he deserved for keeping such a big secret and potentially crucial information to himself for so long.

"My name was Kyle," Russ said at last, looking solemnly at his sister. "Your name was Joy."

"You are not my brother," Bones said, her voice cold with rage before she slapped the other man.

"Bones-" Booth said, even if he had no idea what he was going to say next given that he at least partly agreed with her response.

"No!" Bones said, glaring between the two men. "He lied about that! What else are you lying about? What else are you not telling us?"

With that said, Bones stormed out of the garage, leaving Russ to look silently at the floor while Booth simply stared at the file out of a lack of anything to say to his partner's brother.

* * *

  
"I was the FBI liaison on a bank robbery task force, working out of Cincinnati in the mid-to-late seventies," Special Agent Warner explained as she sat in Booth's office opposite himself and the Brennan siblings- Booth wasn't going to consider them the 'Keenan' siblings; they'd been the Brennan's for far longer-, walking around his desk before she sat down in a chair opposite the siblings. "Secret Service, State Police, ATF- All of us after a pretty bad bunch of armed robbers working Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa... You know, excuse me; am I to understand that I'm addressing the family of one of these robbers?"

"Max and Ruth Keenan's children," Booth said; they weren't doing anyone any favours by trying to side-step that issue.

"Max and Ruth, yeah," Warner said after a moment's awkward silence, smiling slightly at the memory. "They never really belonged in that crew."

"Why?" Bones asked, her voice a simple tone that gave no sign how she might feel about the implications of that last statement.

"They worked smart," Warner explained as she opened her file. "Specialized in safe deposit boxes. No guns. They'd either con their way in or case out the place, break back in on the weekend. Took their time. We never got a handle on the size of their scores."

"Why?" Russ asked.

"Well, people keep jewellery and cash in safety deposit boxes..." Warner explained.

"And a lot of stuff they don't want to report stolen," Booth added, recalling some of the things he'd left in storage deposit boxes over the years when he was Angel; so long as you remembered the relevant information, he could leave anything in those things and come back to get them after the original staff had moved on, saving him the difficulty of explaining why he didn't age.

"None of us understood why stand-up criminals, like Max and Ruth, would join the Midwest strong arm crew," Warner continued as she studied the file again. "Links to white supremacists, real dedication to firearms and violence. A job in Dayton went really bad. Two innocent bystanders were killed. One state trooper, seven wounded."

"When was that?" Booth asked, sitting behind his desk; the way this conversation looked to be going, it would be best to remind Warner which of them had the authority in this particular investigation.

"July 4th, 1978," Warner said. For a moment, Booth wondered where he'd been at that point in his life, but dismissed it as irrelevant; at that particular point in his existence, he'd pretty much just been operating on the outskirts of humanity since that mess with the doughnut store clerk, stepping in if something happened a few feet away from him but otherwise just lying around waiting to find something small to wander over to him so that he could drink it.

"Never caught 'em?" Russ asked.

"Not us, no," Warner replied. "A few years later, one of them turned state's evidence for an FBI agent out of... Louisville; sent the rest to jail. My understanding is they're all dead."

"Our parents were bank robbers... who morphed into a high school science teacher and a bookkeeper?" Russ said, looking at Agent Warner in obvious confusion at what they'd just learned.

"Their particular brand of safety deposit break-ins stopped," Warner responded. "At the time, I figured the strong-arm crew killed them for their cut."

Booth was almost relieved when the technician came into the office to inform him that they had found blood in the car; the anomaly of blood from two separate people was an obvious additional complication, but at least it was a complication that they could try and figure out the answers to right now.

Even if they could theorise about what had prompted Max and Ruth to become Matthew and Christine, the only way they could know for _sure_ what had happened with the evidence available to them was to talk to Max/Matthew, and that was if he was still alive; at least the blood might give them someone else to talk to...

* * *

  
"If you keep bringing Chinese food in the middle of the night, we're both going to get fat," Bones said as they sat in her apartment later that night, putting her chopsticks down as she spoke.

"I know what you've been thinking," Booth said, lying comfortably back on her couch as he discarded his fortune from the fortune cookie; after getting his Shanshu, as far as he was concerned, anything else that happened to him was nothing.

"I doubt it," Bones replied, looking back at him with a dejected stare.

"You've been thinking that your family is made up of liars and criminals," Booth said; it might not be the same thing, but he'd felt the same way when he'd first regained his soul and realised that the only people he actually knew- even if they'd known Angelus rather than him, his mind hadn't adjusted enough to make that kind of distinction yet- were psychotic murderers who killed for fun. "And that makes you feel lonely. There's a story here we don't know yet."

"Like what?" Bones asked.

"Bones," Booth said- why did she seem to miss the obvious at times?-, "'don't know' means it's a mystery."

"What were your parents like?" Bones asked, looking more directly at him.

"My parents?" Booth said, laughing awkwardly to cover his inner panic at such a question; even if he 'remembered' living with Booth's parents, whenever anyone asked him about them his mind automatically went to Liam's mother and father rather than Booth's, and it took him a moment to recall the fine details of the parents he should be talking about.

"My dad, he..." he continued, hoping that Bones didn't find anything off about his slightly slow response, "He drove thuds and phantoms in Vietnam- those are fighter jets-; after that, he was a barber in Philadelphia, and my mom, she wrote jingles for a local advertising agency."

"So they didn't go out at night after you were asleep and rob banks?" Bones asked.

"Listen, Bones," Booth said, stuck for anything else to say to that comment. "You know, parents... they have secret lives; if they didn't, they wouldn't be parents."

He felt the inadequacy of that statement as soon as he'd said it; how could he honestly claim that parents had secrets when, in his experience, children were the ones who kept secrets from their parents rather than the other way around? Back in Sunnydale, Oz was the only person being anything close to regularly honest with his family, and that was only because his cousin had already been 'infected' with the werewolf gene (Actually, now that Booth thought about it, what _had_ Oz's parents known about his daily life beyond that he went to the library on the full moon to get locked away to stop him hurting anyone?); Buffy and Fred had only told their parents about their lives when circumstances demanded it, Giles and Wesley had been raised in this world, Gunn never really mentioned his parents- most of the time Angel assumed that Gunn had gotten involved in the vampire-hunting lifestyle after vampires killed the rest of his family-, and everyone else just seemed content to leave their families behind after moving on from Sunnydale.

"It's a little late for Chinese, isn't it?" he said, stuck for anything else he could say at this point that wouldn't be either a lie or more of the truth than he could safely reveal. "Thanks for the meal; see you tomorrow."

* * *

  
"They found your blood in the car," Bones said as the two of them followed Vince McVicker into his barn, the forensic anthropologist maintaining her usual cool resolve despite the fact that they were facing a man who may have very well played a part in whatever happened to her parents.

"You hurt lots of people, Vince," Booth said. "Bashed in their heads..."

"Well, they never proved that, or I wouldn't be in Witness Protection," McVicker said, looking back at Booth with the same smug little smile that had always made Booth want to punch Lindsey in the face.

"Yeah, we know how it works, Vince," Booth said, staring back at the other man; after facing the likes of the Beast and Hamilton, an aging pig farmer was almost boring. "You rat out your crew, everybody loses interest in a few old murders..."

"My mother was hit on the head," Bones said, folding her arms as she stared at him.

"Yeah, I know; I was there," McVicker said, pulling his hair back to reveal a scar on his forehead. "Thirty-two stitches."

"She fought back, huh?" Booth said, tensing slightly as he spoke; nobody would reveal something like that unless there was something else going on here...

"Ruthie fought back alright," McVicker said, a slightly grim expression on his face that Booth knew meant that they weren't going to like what he was about to say, "but not against me."

"Then against whom?" Bones asked.

"Your father," McVicker replied, in a manner that could have indicated regret if Booth wasn't already resolved to take anything this guy had to tell them with a whole shaker of salt.

"Why did he attack you?" Booth asked, hoping that he wasn't about to hear the answer he was partly expecting and really didn't want to hear; things were crap enough for Bones without this guy coming out with _that_...

"Think about it a second, all right?" McVicker said, a slight smile on his face that Booth automatically hated almost more than any grin he'd received from Lindsey.

"You and my... my mother?" Bones said incredulously.

"Me and Ruthie had run off together," McVicker explained. "Max caught us pulling into a motel outside of Champaign, Illinois. We were nuts about each other, Ruthie and me; crazy in love-"

"OK, let's just skip that part, OK?" Booth said, holding up a warning hand; he didn't need to have known Bones for a year to see how hard she was taking this latest discovery.

"Well, he hit Ruthie first," McVicker said, after a moment's hesitation that could have been reluctance to remember such a painful memory or could have been a man on the spot trying to come up with a story; Booth didn't know enough about the people involved to know which was true in this situation yet.

"With what?" Bones asked, a tremor in her voice that Booth had heard far too much for his liking since this case began.

"Tire iron," McVicker said. "Hit my arm, caught me a roundhouse to the head. Lights out, baby. I came to, Ruthie and Max were gone. Never saw neither of them again. You ask me, Max killed Ruthie and buried her somewhere and vanished. Our plan, once we set up- most likely in Florida- was to bring you down. Your father is a hard man, Joy."

If it wasn't for the fact that he had no way of knowing whether the guy was telling the truth or lying through his teeth, Booth would have punched him in the face just for saying that.

Throughout all the crap discoveries they'd been making over the last few days, one of the few things Bones had been able to hold on to was the knowledge that her parents had loved each other no matter what they called themselves, and now this guy came out and claimed...

"My name is Brennan," Bones said, her voice shaking as she clearly fought for some kind of emotional control after this last revelation. "I'm Doctor... I'm Doctor Temperance Brennan."

As McVicker walked out of the barn, Booth immediately scratched one notch in the 'against' column for the pig-farmer's story- there was no way that a man who'd been 'crazy in love' with a woman would be _that_ dismissive of her daughter-, but as Bones continued to struggle through her tears to recite her various qualifications and area of expertise, Booth knew that he was needed here more than anywhere else.

"I know who you are," he said, gathering his partner into his arms, focusing only on what she needed to hear at this point rather than worrying about anything that McVicker had claimed. "Hey, I know. It's OK... it's going to be OK..."

He'd gone through his fair share of identity crises in the past, what with all the times he'd lost his soul, his memory, or his purpose, and right now, he knew that the one thing Bones needed was someone who knew who she was.

Everything else could be dealt with later; right now, all that mattered was that Bones knew that someone else believed in her as she was now, regardless of what anyone else tried to tell her about who she should or shouldn't be.

* * *

  
"Anybody thirsty?" Bones asked as they walked into her apartment later, Bones now visibly more relaxed than she had been earlier; they might still not know what had happened to her father, but at least they'd confirmed that her mother hadn't been killed for having an affair, and been able to bring in her mother's killer, even if he still wasn't talking about what happened to the other part of her missing family tree.

"Is it too early for beer?" Russ asked.

"Ah, I gotta go, you know, I'm picking up Parker for the weekend..." Booth began, before his eyes fell on what could only be a manuscript lying on the table in front of him and he quickly changed his mind; if he could at least take a _look_ at the book, that might be enough. "Yeah, I'll take one."

"You have a boy?" Russ asked.

"Yeah," Booth said, lifting up the first page of the manuscript, only to halt as he took in the words written on the second page.

 _This book is to my partner and friend, Special Agent Seeley Booth_.

It wasn't something that he'd ever considered, but, in a strange way, this simple twelve-word dedication was the most touching thing that anyone had said or done for him for ages.

The thought that someone like Bones- smart to an almost ridiculous degree, but also cut off from human contact to a point that made him look social back when he was Angel- thought that he was worth dedicating a book to...

"The woman I'm seeing," Russ said, his voice bringing Booth's mind back to the present, "she's got, uh, two daughters."

"Nice," Booth said, smiling as he put the page down and looked over at Bones, who was coming back with two beers in her hands. "Girls are nice."

As he took the beer Bones offered him, he briefly flashed back to the last time he'd said those words- feigning drunkenness in a Los Angeles bar to catch some vampires off-guard-, and he definitely preferred the situation he found himself in right now, drinking with his partner and her brother in their apartment after a case.

He'd come so far since those dark decades waiting for rats in an alleyway...

"To us," he said, raising the offered beer in a toast.

"Whoever the hell we are," Russ said.

"To what we're becoming," Bones concluded, smiling warmly at her brother as they clinked bottles together and took a sip, before Bones turned around to press a button on her phone.

" _New message recorded today_ ," the familiar female answering-machine voice said. " _Three p.m._."

" _Temperance_?" an unfamiliar male voice said, prompting Booth to cease his contemplative study of the bottle in his hands and look back at his partner. " _You have to stop looking. Y-You have to stop looking for me right now. This is bigger and worse than you know. Please stop now_."

"Who's that?" Booth asked, looking at the shocked expression on the face of the siblings standing around him.

"That was my father," Bones said, her shock obvious as she stared at him.

They may have solved this case, but there was clearly a lot more that their team would need to figure out before everything made sense...


	24. The Titan on the Tracks

As he stepped out of the car, Booth almost had to shudder at the sight of the damaged train and car in front of him; even after all the sights he'd seen as a vampire, he still wasn't used to seeing such large-scale destruction, given that so many demons and enemies from that point in his life had tended to focus on only causing smaller-scale damage to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention (The Beast and Jasmine's attacks had been an obvious exception, and he didn't count what happened after the fight against the Black Thorn as nobody remembered that any more).

Witnessing such public damage like this... no matter how he might find it easier to focus on more individual efforts, it still wasn't exactly easy for him.

"Got passenger cars on the tracks, one on the side," Booth said, looking around as firefighters and paramedics scrambled to do their jobs and find any survivors of this horrible accident (He wouldn't allow himself to become jaded; the day he started assuming that every horrible thing he encountered had to have happened on purpose was the day he'd quit). "There's gonna be fatalities."

"Stan!" a voice said, prompting Booth to slightly shift his pace to walk towards the direction of the voice in question, as a dark-haired woman in a blue jumpsuit walked out from under the train clutching a severed forearm in her hand. "I need some gauze. Danny? You don't find the owner of this in the next ten minutes, he'll bleed to death. Starting... now."

Looking up as she set the arm's watch for the aforementioned time limit, Doctor Camille Saroyan walked up to him with a smile. "Seeley."

"Camille," Booth replied, continuing their usual 'running gag' (He couldn't even remember how this had actually started, although he wasn't sure if that absence was due to a flaw in the spell that created Seeley Booth's past- they'd created an entire background in a relatively short amount of time; some holes were to be expected-, or just natural memory loss after so long since the original event).

"Don't call me Camille," Cam replied.

"Don't call me Seeley," Booth countered, before he indicated the woman by his side; he knew that Cam had at least some professional knowledge of his partner, but he wouldn't presume any prior knowledge of Cam on Bones's part given his partner's usual focus on immediately relevant facts and Cam's greater expertise in a different profession. "Doctor Brennan, Doctor Saroyan; you two know each other, huh?"

"No," Bones replied, just as Cam confirmed the relationship with the same word.

"Uh-oh," Booth said, as another thought occurred to her; since Bones had been away since their last case together trying to get re-acquainted with her brother, she probably wasn't aware of the recent changes back at the lab...

"Doctor Brennan," Cam continued, apparently unconcerned about what had prompted Booth's 'uh-oh'. "I'd like you to check out the automobile this train hit. It's probably what caused the derailment."

"Accidental?" Booth asked.

"NTSB guy says the train struck the car at least 200 yards from the nearest access," Cam said.

"Deliberate," Booth concluded, privately cursing at this turn of events as another man began to bandage the arm Cam was holding in her hands.

"Eight minutes, Steve!" Cam called over her shoulder, before she turned to look at the two of them again. "Probably suicide. Why are you still here, Doctor Brennan?"

"Because I'm not a coroner, and I don't work for you?" Bones replied.

"You've got that half right," Cam said, leaving Bones to look at Booth for an explanation that Booth definitely wasn't looking forward to giving...

"Got him, Cam!" another voice called from somewhere off to the side. "Still breathin'!"

"Thanks, Steve," Cam said, placing the severed arm on a passing gurney that presumably carried the arm's original owner. "All right, every survivor is one less person for me to autopsy."

As she looked at Booth, Cam smiled in a manner that put Booth momentarily in mind of Cordelia when she was about to make a flirtatious comment. "You look good out of your suit, Seeley. But then, you always did."

"Yeah, that's..." Booth said, uncertain what he could really say in this situation as Cam turned to walk away; his fake memories might be detailed, but they were still often lost amid the chaos of his own, real past unless he had time to concentrate on them, which he didn't have time to do right now and wasn't certain if he wanted to analyse anyway. "Great to have you back in DC, Camille."

"One minute she's holding a severed arm, the next, she's hitting on you," Bones said, smiling briefly at him as she moved towards the burnt-out car that had previously been on the tracks.

"No, she wasn't hitting on me," Booth corrected (Another reason he didn't want to explore those relationships in his false memories too closely; the Powers might have crafted Booth's past to make him at least psychologically similar to Angel, but there were still a few fine details that he was uncomfortable exploring regarding his choice in relationships). "And you know what? She is your boss, Bones."

"What?" Bones said, briefly looking in her bag for gloves as they walked towards the car. "Goodman's my boss."

At least that response confirmed what Booth had already suspected, but he was left very grateful at the distraction offered when Bones briefly talked with a firefighter who was putting out the last flames on the damaged car; it was a brief reprieve, but it was a reprieve from what he had a feeling was going to be an awkward conversation, as well as giving him the chance to work out the best way to say what he was about to say.

"You know," he said, as Bones leaned into the car from the front passenger seat, examining the remains with a flashlight, "while you were away, Goodman decided that there should be a head of forensics at the Jeffersonian. Never occurred to you to check in, huh?"

"Why didn't Goodman hire me?" Bones asked, even as her attention focused on the car in front of her.

"My guess?" Booth said; Bones appreciated direct responses, so that was what she'd get right now. "People skills."

"I have people skills," Bones replied, still focused on the burnt-out car.

"Oh, all right," Booth said, indicating the fireman she'd addressed earlier as he recognised the man's face (He might be better at this than Bones, but keeping track of all the people he met as Booth wasn't exactly easy). "That firefighter's name is Nelson, and it's at least the fourth time that you've met him. Odds are, Cam knows his kids' names after meeting him once."

"A lot of jewellery," Bones said; if it wasn't for the fact that she had replied to him earlier, Booth would have wondered if she was even aware that he was talking to her. "Male. Thigh bones suggests he was tall. I.D. bracelet. It's good quality gold, slightly melted, too melted for a regular car fire. Do you see a skull?"

"Hey, Bones, I'm not looking for a skull," Booth said; he'd cut off a few demon heads in his life as Angel, but he _really_ didn't want to get into the habit of picking up body-parts in this kind of condition unless he had to.

"Burn damage to the body is more intense than I'd expect from a car fire, even if the fuel tank ruptured and was absolutely full at the time of impact," Bones commented.

"Do you see anything on this car that isn't ruptured?" Booth pointed out.

"Booth!" Cam called, hurrying over to talk to him. "Three deaths in the first class car."

"Oh, homicide!" Booth said, allowing himself a brief- albeit morbid- smile at the news. "That makes it my case."

"One of them's a senator," Cam added.

"That makes a difference?" Bones asked, pulling back from the car to look at him more directly.

"Facts of life, Bones," Booth said, as he headed off to investigate the bodies Cam had discovered, leaving Bones to examine the car until more professional investigators arrived.

It might not be a fact of life he liked, but at least the death of a senator meant that more people would be invested in finding a solution to this case rather than trying to sweep it under the rug, or just give it a relatively cursory go-over...

* * *

  
"Agent Booth," Rick Turco said as he sat opposite Booth and Brennan in the diner- a part of Booth hated to taint this place where they came to relax by directly associating it with an investigation, but it allowed for a more informal atmosphere that could be important when dealing with those he couldn't officially arrest yet-, his tone casual as he addressed the two of them, "I'm a private investigator; my greatest asset is my discretion."

"Brianna Lynch already told us that you worked for her husband, Mr Turco," Bones said.

"Well, Mrs Lynch is welcome to say whatever she likes," Turco said, looking casually at his food.

"You know the client confidentiality routine no longer exists when the client is dead," Booth pointed out, leaning contemplatively on his right arm as he looked at the other man.

"That's not the assurance I give my very demanding, very high-profile clients," Turco said solemnly. "Till death do us not part."

There were times when Booth could not believe the situational ethics of some people; when did client confidentiality become this important to someone who was willing to poke around in someone's dirty laundry- metaphorically and sometimes physically- after everything else they were doing to or for their clients...?

"Yeah?" he said, looking resolutely at Turco; if this guy was going to drag down the standards of what he'd once done for a living in his previous life, he was going to ensure that the guy faced up to what he'd done in the past. "How would your very demanding, very high-profile clients feel if they find out you procured heroin for Warren Lynch?"

"What?" Turco asked, his smile faltering at this new news.

"Warren Lynch was a heroin addict," Bones clarified.

"I open up a drug investigation on you, Mr. Turco, and once the press gets wind of that, your high-profile clients find some other unprincipled Mr. Fix-It," Booth said, enjoying the shock on Turco's face at that news as he chewed on a fry; he might not be a private investigator any more himself, but the thought of someone abusing the role to help people cover up their own indiscretions and screw-ups just made him sick...

"Warren Lynch was a junkie?" Turco said, with what Booth was surprised to note was suspiciously genuine shock. "What's your evidence?"

"Bones?" Booth asked, looking over at his partner as she handed a file to Turco.

"Well..." Turco said, studying the file's contents for a few moments- Booth made a mental note to talk with Bones once he saw the contents of the file; he doubted that anyone he'd met who wasn't Bones, Willow or Fred could understand that paperwork-, "so, what does all of this mean?"

"Sum it all up for me, Bones," Booth said; he'd talk to her about simplifying the evidence she showed to clients later.

"Warren Lynch suffered declining bone mass, due to long-term abuse of his hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis," Bones said, once again turning what should be a simple explanation into an excessively complicated one.

"Nothing says 'junkie' like your gonad's axis, Ricky," he said, trying to sound like he had a clear idea what Bones was saying even as he knew he'd got the name wrong; if Buff could bluff her way through the names of demons, he could pretend to follow Bones's science stuff.

"I had no idea," Turco said, his voice low as he looked at them, clearly in shock at this latest news. "I certainly never procured any heroin for him."

"Warren Lynch sure wasn't trolling for ten dollar hits in Lincoln Heights," Booth pointed out.

"Well, Agent Booth, you know my rep," Turco said, smiling at him in a manner that was probably meant to make him appear 'buddy-buddy' but just made Booth more suspicious. "I'm a sin eater. I make problems go away."

"You mean like when Lynch's wife found out he was sleeping with other women?" Bones asked.

"All right, anything I say, strictest confidence, correct?" Turco said, waiting for Booth and Bones to respond before he continued speaking. "Warren Lynch brought me in to deal with a blackmailer."

"Lynch was being blackmailed?" Booth asked, leaning back in his chair as he looked at Turco.

"By one of his girlfriends?" Bones asked.

"That would be my assumption, yes," Turco confirmed. "I'd paid them off before, but this was a much bigger deal, more serious. Had to be the heroin, right?"

"Let it play out," Booth said, projecting an appearance of understanding despite his distaste for the concept of what they were discussing.

"I negotiated the payment from a mill to a quarter million, paid 'em off, that was three days ago," Turco continued.

"How?" Booth asked.

"Dead drop at Rock Creek Park," Turco replied.

"And you have no idea who it was," Booth concluded.

"No," Turco confirmed with a brief shake of the head. "I got a phone call. When I traced it back, it dead ended on a stolen cell phone."

Exchanging glances with Bones, Booth smiled slightly at his partner.

This meeting may have left them with relatively limited information, but at least they were finding more evidence to support the idea that someone had deliberately killed Lynch, rather than the heroin thing being an unrelated but disturbing 'extra' in this situation...

* * *

  
"Two people forced the corpse into the jacket; that's excellent work," Cam said, studying the information that Booth had managed to assemble as the two of them stood in the autopsy bay before she indicated the image on the photograph that Angela had managed to recover. "Who's that?"

"I think it's Rick Turco," Booth replied.

"Means Turco's probably the last person who saw Lynch before he fell off the radar," Cam said.

"Of course," Booth added, "Angela and Zack are scared that this counts as an experiment and you're going to fire them."

"Ah!" Cam said with a smile. "I am getting through."

"Why did you take this job, Camille?" Booth asked; in this rare moment when they were both alone, it was the best chance he was going to get to find out the answer the question that had been bugging him for a while now.

"Why shouldn't I, Seeley?" Cam replied.

"Because it's basically herding cats, and you're a dog person," Booth clarified.

"Dogs herd cats," Cam responded.

"Dogs don't do that," Booth said; he might have never owned a dog himself, but he'd dealt with enough demons to know how animal nature worked.

"Chase 'em up trees, whatever," Cam said dismissively.

"Seriously, Cam," Booth said, smiling at her brief joke before he focused the conversation back on what mattered, "why did you take this job?"

"These," Cam said, picking up a metal implement from a nearby table, "are Are titanium rib-clippers from Germany. My last job? Used bolt cutters from Home Depot. These are much, much nicer. This autopsy table? Has downdraft ventilation. No rotting corpse smell, Seeley. My last table didn't even have a drain. Think about that a second. Leaky corpse, no drain."

"So you took this job for better equipment," Booth concluded; for a moment, he was reminded of his team's old reasons for taking control of Wolfram & Hart, save for the fact that there was no spiritual compromises being made here.

"I've spent my whole professional life in basement rooms with no windows," Cam said

"Now I'm in the Jeffersonian Institute... what?" she finished, noting the intense stare he was directing at her.

"Gotta ask," Booth said with a shrug.

"You so do not," Cam replied.

"Did you take this job because of...?" Booth asked, indicating himself; he might not be entirely sure how _he_ felt about Cam given that all his memories of their relationship had been artificially added to his memory, but that didn't mean he could really expect to know how _she_ would feel about things.

"God, the ego!" Cam said, laughing.

"Say it," Booth said, keeping his expression neutral as he avoided rising to the potential jab of her words; he didn't seriously think the scenario he'd proposed was the case, but it was best to be sure.

"Nothing to do with you," Cam confirmed.

"I need Bones this afternoon," Booth said, changing the subject to something less potentially embarrassing.

"OK," Cam said with a speculative expression on her face.

"It's about her mother's murder and her father's disappearance," Booth clarified before he turned to leave the room.

"Plus, she dedicated her book to you, so..." Cam began.

"It's a legitimate case, Cam," Booth interjected, halting his departure to point firmly at her.

"I know," Cam said. "I read the file."

Smiling in relief at the conclusion to that particular topic of discussion, Booth turned around to leave the lab, only to be halted when Cam asked an unexpected question. "Why hasn't she confronted me?"

"About what?" Booth asked as he turned back; 'she' was obviously Bones, but he had no idea what Cam was talking about.

"About me being parachuted in over her head," Cam clarified. "Finds me intimidating, right?"

Booth allowed himself a brief laugh at that suggestion; after so long repressing his emotions as Angel, one thing that he particularly liked about being Booth was the freedom to take the chance to express himself, the additional memories of Booth making it far easier for him to relax where Angel had been uncertain.

"Hey, I intimidate people," Cam said, smiling with a slightly indignant manner.

"Yeah... Bones doesn't intimidate," Booth said, still grinning at the suggestion as he walked over to stand in front of Cam.

"Then... what?" Cam asked.

"Have you seen the way she stares at human remains before she makes a decision?" Booth asked.

"Yes," Cam confirmed.

"You're human remains, and... she hasn't made a decision yet," Booth finished

"How do I help her make the right decision?" Cam asked, as he turned towards the door again.

"Go for the truth," Booth answered, deciding to avoid the implications of the 'right decision' statement until later; it was still too early to determine whether Cam was the right person for this job or not. "You know, take care of her people. Oh, and I like the whole intimidation thing; I think it's cute."

* * *

  
"How am I going to tell Russ that our father ordered the death of another human being?" Bones asked, as the two of them drove away from the prison where they'd just spoken with the murderer of Vince McVicker, an expression of quiet desolation on his partner's face.

"If he did that- and I'm not saying it happened that way-," Booth said, trying to sound as reassuring as he could when faced with a situation where he agreed with the motives behind the action, "then your father took down the man who murdered his wife."

"Good people don't have other people murdered," Bones said, with a tragic certainty in her tone as though she was refusing to believe his suggestion. "Good people don't even know how."

The simplicity of that statement almost made Booth more uncomfortable than anything else she might have said.

He might not have been the best person possible as Angel or Booth- his mistakes as Liam were so long ago that they didn't count, and he _definitely_ didn't count anything he'd done as Angelus as a sin as it wasn't him-, but he liked to think that he'd been a good man whatever other faults he might have had; the idea that Bones could automatically dismiss him as a good person- even if unintentionally- because he'd had to kill people...

"Well..." he said, stuck for anything else he could say in this situation and wanting to avoid that particular issue until a better time. "Your father buried your mother in a pair of new shoes in a cemetery, with her dolphin belt buckle that reminded her of you because you both loved dolphins."

"That does not make him a good man," Bones said, looking at him in confusion.

"People can be more than one thing," Booth said, looking reassuringly at her before he changed the subject to a more positive note. "We were a dead end! All right, we know that your father got to Mitchell Downs, persuaded him to kill McVicker. We find out how he did that, we're that much closer to finding out what happened to your old man. I mean, that's... if you still want to find him."

"I do," Bones said, a tearful tremor in her voice.

"OK," Booth said, choosing to focus on the positives and leave this conversation at that. "Silver lining."

He just wished that he didn't feel so depressed at the implications of her last statement; in both of his lives, he'd killed people, even if they'd mostly died because he felt that he had no other choice but to do so, and Bones's words implied that she couldn't consider him a good man because of that...

* * *

  
Sitting in the lounge area on the Jeffersonian's upper level, Booth was surprised to find himself reminded of his time at Wolfram & Hart in a manner that didn't make him feel completely uncomfortable; they might be dealing with a pain in the neck lawyer who was more focused on making the case legally stick than acknowledging the problems they'd faced assembling that information, but at least the team were all working together towards a common singular goal.

"Turco will admit to helping Lynch place a body in Mr. Lynch's car, and rigging it to burn, with the intent of moving the market," Lisa Supek explained as she sat at the head of the table looking at the assorted 'squint squad' gathered around it (It amazed Booth how even the way they sat said so much about them; Bones at attention, Zach slumped in his chair, Hodgins looking disdainfully at Supek, Angela relatively casual, and Cam looking contemplatively at Supek from the other end of the table). "Everything else, including placing it on the tracks, he said Mr. Lynch did himself."

"Well, he's lying," Booth said simply.

"There's the small matter of proving that in court," Supek commented, glancing critically over at him.

"What's the maximum sentence on those charges?" Cam asked.

"Ten years," Supek stated.

"He killed three people," Angela said, looking indignantly at Supek at the shortness of the sentence compared to the crime.

"And put one in a coma," Hodgins added.

"Yes, but Lynch deserves to be in a coma, so it doesn't count," Zach added (Booth wondered if he should worry about the younger man's situational ethics, but quickly dismissed that train of thought; if nothing else, he completely agreed with Zach's assessment).

"All right, look," Booth said, trying to get the woman to focus on actually punishing the man in question, "Turco puts all the blame on Lynch, does the ten years, and he gets all the money from shorting the stock."

"It's ten years or nothing," Supek said, indicating the paperwork in front of her. "I can only work with what I'm given, and the forensic work on this was not good enough."

"What?" Bones said (Not that Booth could blame her; the idea that this woman was actually trying to _blame_ them for being fooled by some very carefully-established fake evidence set up by a rather intelligent guy was offensive at best).

"You were fooled by fake dental records, you baked some spam..." Supek explained.

"What did you want us to do?" Cam asked.

"Your job," Supek said.

"Hey!" Booth said, glaring at the woman in frustration.

"No, Ms. Supek, you want us to do your job," Cam stated, her tone direct and emotionless as she stared at the other woman. "My people gave you all the evidence you need to fry Turco with any reasonable jury."

"Forensically-" Supek began.

"We gave you everything you needed to arrest Turco," Cam said firmly.

"Arrest is not a conviction," Supek countered.

"We gave you enough to reject his plea bargain and indict him on the wrongful death of a Senator," Cam continued (Booth was suddenly reminded of some of the cases Gunn had carried out when they'd been working at Wolfram & Hart; he might not have always understood what his friend was doing, but he'd definitely admired the way Gunn handled his cases).

"Indictment is not a conviction," Supek said (Booth hated it when people repeated themselves like that; you were trying to give them what they were after and they got all picky when you couldn't promise exact results).

"You accept that plea bargain, the investigation stops," Booth said, leaning over to ensure that Supek understood what he was saying.

"Indict him," Bones said earnestly. "Give us time to give you what you need."

"You accept this plea bargain, you don't deserve to be a federal prosecutor," Cam continued.

"Doctor Saroyan-" Supek began.

"Yeah, it's scary," Cam conceded. "The whole country will be watching the trial, and you don't want to go in with less than a sure thing. But you put my people on the stand as expert witnesses and that's a sure thing."

"Not Zach," Bones, Hodgins and Angela all said virtually simultaneously (Not that Booth could blame them; Zach was a nice enough guy, but he just didn't give the right impression for the job).

"You tell people the story of what happened using the evidence these people provided and if you have any ability as a prosecutor, you'll win the case," Cam said firmly.

"Are you finished?" Supek asked.

"No, Ms. Supek," Cam said, staring at the other woman with a cold resolution that Booth had so often seen on Buffy or Cordelia's faces when they were making a statement. "In the future, when you have problems with my team, you register them with me in private, not by grandstanding in a public forum."

With a tight smile on her face, Supek walked away from the lounge, followed by Cam, leaving Booth to smile slightly over at Bones at this evidence of Cam's skills.

"OK," Bones conceded with a faint smile. "I, um... _sort_ of see why she got the job."

It was a small concession, but when dealing with Doctor Temperance Brennan, Booth had learned long ago that the small ones were the ones that really mattered; she only really made big ones when she knew she absolutely had to do so.

They might still be faced with the challenge of getting sufficient evidence together to ensure a conviction, but at least the new dynamics of the lab's command structure had been established to everyone's reasonable satisfaction...


	25. Mother and Child in the Bay

"Why can't you go faster?" Bones asked, looking inquiringly at him as they pulled away from the Jeffersonian. "I don't see why I couldn't drive."

"Because you're agitated," Booth countered, staring at the road before him, trying not to think about his recent conversation with Rebecca.

"I am not," Bones said indignantly.

"You know what," Booth said, taking his sunglasses off with one hand while keeping the other on the steering-wheel, "you've turned this into a competition between you and Cam."

"I just like to be first on the scene, that's all," Bones said. "To protect the evidence."

"She's not going to disturb anything," Booth said; sometimes he wondered if Bones thought that she was the only person who knew how to process a crime scene with this kind of evidence...

"No, it's all tissue and blood and DNA with her; she doesn't appreciate the skeletal system," Bones said, before she pointed out of the windshield. "You can take the I-70, it'll be quicker."

"Don't back-seat drive, OK?" Booth said.

"Oh, I think I know who's agitated," Bones said, smiling at him in a manner that would have been teasing from anyone else but inspired something he really didn't want to examine too closely when it came from her.

"Someone is annoying me, OK?" Booth said, trying to restrain the urge to scoff at her insinuation. "That's different."

"Your ex," Bones said.

"Huh?" Booth asked, confused at whether Bones had just changed the subject or guessed who he was talking about.

"That's who's annoying you," Bones said, a teasing tone entering her voice as she looked at him. "Because she has a new man in her life."

"That's funny, you know?" Booth said, glaring back at her. "OK, I am concerned about my son. I wanna know what kind of guy this new boyfriend is. And you know what? If she's not gonna tell me, I'll find out on my own."

He knew that part of the reason for his paranoia where Parker was concerned was how things had fallen apart with Connor thanks to Holtz, but he'd promised himself long ago that he'd never fail his children when he was human the same way he'd failed to protect Connor; if that meant that he had to be a bit over-protective, he'd deal with the consequences of it so long as Parker had the stable childhood from the beginning that should have been Connor's.

"You're going to run a background check on him?" Bones asked, looking at him in surprise.

"You have kids and we'll talk," Booth countered.

"That's a lot to ask for a little conversation," Bones said, the anthropologist indicating another direction when Booth simply scoffed at her comment. "If you make a right we can cut through Grafton."

"Fine," Booth said, turning in the indicated direction; at this point, he was just glad for a chance to end this awkward conversation.

* * *

  
"You want me to what?" Booth asked, not certain if he'd heard Bones correctly as he walked through the corridors of the FBI building while talking to his partner on his cellphone; he might have become more capable in its use since he was Angel, but that didn't mean that he didn't still have some trouble sometimes.

" _Stab the body for me_ ," Bones repeated. " _We need to match force with the injuries recorded on the remains_."

"OK, I'm stabbing the body..." Booth said, trying to work out the chain of circumstances that led to Doctor Temperance Brennan _wanting_ to compromise evidence...

" _Well, it's a replica_ ," Bones clarified. " _We're all going to do it, you're just the closest to Kyle Richardson_."

"OK, you know what, that's great, be there in twenty," Booth said, satisfied that the most important question was answered; at least Bones hadn't suddenly suffered a mental breakdown or anything like that. "But in the future you're just going to have to ask me differently, Bones, because you know what? Come over to your place to stab a body; that is just freaky."

"Seeley, you son of a bitch," a voice said, drawing Booth's attention from the phone call, prompting him to turn around and take in the sight of a familiar blonde walking down the corridor in a purple top and a black knee-length skirt.

 _Rebecca_...

God, this conversation was _never_ going to be anything other than awkward; their relationship was so complicated to define for him at times. Even without the fact that they engaged in the occasional 'sexual liaison' when they weren't in any active relationships and needed the release- making their dynamic even harder to define than it would have been in some of his past relationships; he just was never sure how to fully break it off-, there was also the issue that he'd kept so much about his past secret from her when they were dating... the complete absence of information he'd provided about his vampiric history...

"Oh, I- Rebecca," he said, pushing those thoughts aside as he terminated the conversation with Bones. "Wow, you look great."

"Yeah, okay, save it 'cause I need a lot more than compliments from you right now," Rebecca said, glaring at him in such a manner that Booth didn't feel capable of even looking away from her as he backed towards his office.

"OK, just... keep it down a little bit," he said, making shushing motions as they passed through a crowded area, Booth turning around only long enough to walk through the door of his office before he turned back to face her. "'Cause I'm at work, all right?"

"You sent agents to investigate Drew?" Rebecca asked, as they walked through the door of his office. "Because you're going to stop that now."

"OK, listen, I'm just being cautious," Booth said, holding up his hands defensively. "What do you really know about this guy, anyway?"

"I know- I know that he has a good job," Rebecca said, still glaring at him as Booth was forced to walk backwards to the other side of his desk as she continued to rant. "And I know that he fixes stuff around the house when he says he's going to And I know that Parker is crazy about him and he's not terrified every time he goes off to work that he's going to get shot. And I know that I love him."

That last comment was enough to get Booth to turn around; whenever the mother of his son started using that word to refer to someone else, he felt that a _bit_ of concern was natural...

"I love him," Rebecca repeated, a brief smile on her face at the statement before she resumed glaring at him. "And now everyone at work thinks he's a criminal."

"Well, he's been spotted with explosives," Booth pointed out.

"He is a construction foreman, he does demolition," Rebecca countered. "You must have figured that out when you were doing all of your snooping."

"OK, well, I have a right to know who's around my son, all right?" Booth countered. "He spends more time with Parker than I do."

"OK, you think that I would put Parker in danger?" Rebecca asked (Booth could never decide if Rebecca's lack of knowledge of his past was a good or bad thing at this point; if she didn't know how his relationship with Connor had been so difficult, she had no reason to be concerned about his experience as a father, but on the other hand it meant that she didn't understand the reasons for his caution when his son was concerned).

"Let me ask you a question," he said, trying to focus on the questions that he could answer without compromising his secret past as Angel. "Why is it that you keep all the men in your life such a secret?"

"Because you always interrogate them or intimidate them, and it freaks them out!" Rebecca retaliated.

"Well, I mean, c'mon... a lot are a little strange," Booth replied, trying to make a joke about this increasingly awkward topic. "I mean, the guy with the tattoos on his neck?"

"I don't even have to let you see Parker, OK?" Rebecca interrupted. "Not-not-not legally. That-that's one of the upsides of not being married."

"Don't," Booth said, staring firmly at her; they might not agree about some issues, but he _couldn't_ cope with what she was implying...

"I'm a good father," he said firmly. "You know that."

"You're got to stop trying to run things," Rebecca said after a moment's silence. "I've got things in my life that have nothing to do with you."

She turned to leave, but Booth grabbed her arm before she could reach the door.

"OK, look," he said, turning around so that they were facing each other again, "we are always gonna have something to do with each other because we share a son."

"Drew's a good man," Rebecca said firmly. "And you need to back off or you're not gonna see Parker again, I swear. Back off."

As Rebecca walked out, Booth could only stare after her, trying to conceal the fear he felt at just the thought of the scenario she'd just suggested.

* * *

  
"I don't know how they can do it," Bones said as they drove back to the Jeffersonian after their last meeting with Carlie Richardson's friends.

"They're self-obsessed," Booth said with a shrug. "They have no conscience."

"I don't know..." Bones muttered.

"They destroy anything that gets in their way," Booth continued. "They're not even human." (He acknowledged that he was exaggerating that last bit, but after spending so much time around demons he sometimes wondered if he'd developed an 'idealised' version of humanity as a whole and forgotten just what people could be capable of when they were just people without the supernatural in their lives).

"The mothers?" Bones asked, looking at him in surprise.

"Huh?" Booth said, confused at his partner's sudden change of subject.

"I was talking about the mothers," Bones clarified.

"I'm talking about the killers," Booth responded.

"I understand killers," Bones said. "I just don't know how mothers can do it. I mean, dogs can be trained in a couple of weeks. With kids, mothers have to give up their lives for years."

"No," Booth corrected, remembering his own experiences holding Connor and Parker for the first time; everything that happened to Connor after the fact had been hard, but he wouldn't have changed it for anything. "When you're looking at your kid, you don't feel like you're giving up anything."

"So you would do it again?" Bones asked.

"What?" Booth asked, looking at her in confusion.

"You'd have Parker even with everything you're going through?" Bones elaborated.

"What kind of question is that?" Booth asked.

"Wouldn't it be easier if Parker wasn't caught in this... drama of yours with Rebecca and the new boyfriend?" Bones elaborated.

"God, no," Booth said; parenthood might not be easy, but he wasn't even going to _contemplate_ a scenario where he never had a second shot at being a father. "No, Bones. He's my son. Whatever we're going through, it's not about that; he knows that."

"That's what parents say when they want to justify themselves," Bones said, the grim tone in her voice less effective than it might have been due to the accompanying smile on her face.

"You know," Booth said, his temper momentarily overriding his politeness, "I haven't walked out on Parker, all right? I would never have done what your parents did."

"Well, I didn't say you would," Bones responded, her casual tone at least suggesting she hadn't taken offence to him bringing up her parents like that. "I just... I don't know."

She sighed in frustration as she stared at the road in front of them. "You're the father. I don't know anything about raising kids, so-"

"Parker's fine," Booth said firmly, ignoring his partner's sceptical glance at him as they continued driving.

He had failed Connor in so many ways, but he would _not_ fail Parker.

* * *

  
"I wonder if he'll even care, you know," Booth wondered, as he and Bones drove in his car away from the Jeffersonian, their minds filled with the implications of their latest discoveries. "Finding out that his wife is dead."

"He didn't kill her," Bones pointed out.

"No, but he ran," Booth interjected; he wasn't going to accept any excuse for someone abandoning his family like that. "How do you just cut your family out of your life like that?"

"Well, what about Abraham?" Bones asked.

"What, you're going to throw religion in my face right now?" Booth countered, leaping to the most obvious statement he could make when faced with such a drastic and unexpected change of subject.

"I thought you found answers in what you believe," Bones asked.

"Well, I mean, that's just one Bible story that I just don't like," Booth said; regardless of what time in his life he'd been at- whether Liam, Angelus, Angel or Booth-, it had never felt right to him (Even if Angelus had just not liked it because he felt that God should have let Abraham kill his son anyway). "I mean, God commands Abraham to kill his own son, and he does."

"No," Bones corrected. "Abraham did not kill Isaac."

"But old Abe, you know, he had the intention-" Booth began.

"Well, I thought what he had was faith," Bones asked.

"Look, I have faith," Booth interrupted; this wasn't the time to get into a theological argument, so he was just going to say what mattered and leave it at that. "But if God himself came down, pointed at Parker and said, 'I want you to... you know'; that ain't gonna happen."

He might have had to kill Connor, but that was only because he had made the kind of deal with Lilah and the Senior Partners that even they couldn't cheat on without jeopardising their new desire for him to take control of the company; even they couldn't 'trick' him into killing Connor unless they were genuinely going to bring him back to life afterwards without suffering consequences.

"But God's messenger stopped Abraham?" Bones asked.

"Yeah," Booth conceded. "Grabbed his hand at the last second right before the knife was about to go in."

"OK," Bones said, looking thoughtfully at him. "Then the lesson I would learn from the myth-"

"Myth?" Booth repeated; he might not be certain about the specifics of the Bible, but he still didn't like comparing it to myths.

"Well, it fits the definition," Bones clarified.

"OK, fine," Booth said; he didn't have the time or desire to argue that point right now, and he wanted to hear Bones's final point anyway.

"That when it comes to your children," Bones continued, "your love has to be absolute. The messenger represents goodness, what you know to be right. Ergo, you have to remain open to what you know is true."

Despite the grim mood of the conversation, Booth had to admit that what he'd just heard was the most positive thing he'd ever heard Bones say about religion.

"Are you sure you're not religious?" he asked.

"Science all the way," Bones replied, smiling slightly at him. "Hey, even an empiricist can have a heart, Booth."

"Too bad Richardson doesn't..." Booth said, as his mind turned back to the task awaiting them.

* * *

  
"He's fine?" Kyle Richardson asked, looking uncertainly at them as he paced around Booth's office, clearly shocked at the news that his presumed-dead son was still alive over a year after his mother's death.

"He's perfect," Booth said, looking at Kyle with a neutral expression; considering Kyle's obvious shock at this news, he'd give the other man a chance to step up before judging him for his past.

"And you're sure?" Kyle asked, slightly stammering as he looked back at them.

"He's yours," Bones confirmed.

"When I thought he was gone," Kyle said, ceasing his earlier pacing as he looked at them with a slight edge of what Booth could only think of as nervous excitement about his manner, "and Carlie... I wished I could have changed how things had been."

Kyle's further thoughts were cut off when a social worker entered, carrying the baby boy they had earlier identified as the presumed dead Baby Richardson (Booth wondered if Kyle was going to change the kid's name, considering that he'd been named by his mother's killer, but quickly concluded that it wasn't his business; Kyle could sort that out later).

"Don't you want to hold him?" the social worker asked, holding the baby out to Kyle.

"I don't know," Kyle said, awkwardness once again dominating his appearance. "The kind of guy I am... I'm no father."

"You don't get to decide that," Booth said, memories of his own instinctive reaction to Darla identifying him as her baby's father flashing through his mind; even before he'd contemplated the possibilities of what the child of two vampires would be like, his inability to provide a good role model had been the first thing to occur to him. "You have a son. Step up. Take him."

Staring at his son for a moment, Kyle stepped forward and took the baby from the social worker, smiling uncertainly at the child he'd never known about before now.

"Hey..." he said, smiling at the baby in his arms, hugging him close before he looked at Booth, a smile slowly spreading across his face as he held the last remnant of his wife to him. "Thank you."

Looking at the reunited father and soon, Booth could only smile in satisfaction at the sight before him.

He enjoyed his job of bringing murderers to justice, but there was something far more satisfying- maybe because of how rare it was- in those moments when he was able to bring a family together, rather than just providing a broken group with answers to what had happened to their missing member.

Kyle might have his doubts, but now that he had the chance to step up, it was clear that he was ready and willing to at least try and be a better father to his son; sometimes, you never knew how someone would cope in a situation until they were actually there.


	26. The Boy in the Shroud

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A unique little original scene at the conclusion of this chapter- as opposed to me just 're-interpreting' a scene from the perspective of Booth-as-Angel-, but I felt that it was appropriate

"I assume you're familiar with the Shroud of Turin?" Angela asked, walking around the lab as Booth, Bones and Cam took up position about the laboratory table where Angela had draped the 'burial shroud' of their latest victim, an elaborate camera positioned above the shroud.

"Image of Christ's face on the inside of a burial cloth," Booth replied, briefly remembering the Shroud of Rahmon that had nearly driven him and Gunn to attack each other, to say nothing of what he'd almost done to Kate while under its influence; like every holy artefact, even the Shroud of Turin had to have its counterpart on the other side of the cosmic board, he supposed, even if he was still unclear on whether the Shroud of Turin was meant to have any kind of holy properties about it...

"Right, Booth's a good Catholic boy," Cam said, smiling slightly as she looked at him.

"It was revealed to be a hoax," Bones said in her usual blunt manner.

"It wasn't a hoax," Booth interjected, more out of habit than genuine belief; he believed more in the messages of Christianity rather than the specific details, but the denial helped his image of Seeley Booth as a Catholic attempting to atone for past sins.

"OK, whatever you want to believe..." Bones said, a slight smile in her voice.

"This is no hoax," Angela replied, pulling up a scan of the shroud and demonstrating a photo-negative of the features of their victim on the computer positioned at the side of the lab. "On the fabric covering John Doe's skull, there are tissue stains around the eye sockets, the nose and the mouth. This is essentially a photo negative of his features."

"Are you saying you have enough to assemble a face?" Cam asked, looking at Angela briefly before focusing her attention on the display in front of them.

"I call it the Shroud of Montenegro," Angela explained, a face slowly starting to appear on the projection behind her as she continued to talk, starting with the cheeks and chin before going on to display more detailed impressions of the eyes, mouth and hair of their victim. "I used computer tomography to create x- ray slices of the underlying facial architecture. Selective laser centering allowed me to map unimprinted areas. Skin tone and hair colour were extrapolated based on Doctor. Saroyan's data."

"I'm no expert," Bones said, studying the image that had emerged on the projection, which now showed a young man in his mid- to late teens with dark hair and a strong nose and chin, "but he sure doesn't look like a street kid."

Booth was just grateful that this particular shroud looked like it would inspire more peace than the last one he'd dealt with; if they could just find a way to avoid bringing up Cam's preconceptions about street kids without making Bones's past a topic of discussion, this whole thing could go forward without too many inter-departmental confrontations...

* * *

  
"Were you lying to the boy?" Bones asked, as they walked into her office after their talk with Kelly Morris's foster mother; somehow, both of them had silently agreed that this kind of conversation was best saved for the more professional atmosphere of her office rather than the car ride between the Jeffersonian and the FBI. "Do you really think Kelly Morris is still alive?"

"Ah, I don't know," Booth said with a slight shrug.

"You don't know if she's alive?" Bones asked, looking at him as she turned on the lights in her office.

"I don't know if I was lying," Booth corrected, Bones heading for her desk as he continued to speak. "Ya see, I just... I really don't have a read on the sister yet. I mean was she a bad guy? Was she a victim?"

"Well, do you have a read on Dylan Crane?" Bones asked, as she sat down behind her desk.

"Oh yeah," Booth said, shrugging nonchalantly at the question as he settled down on Bones's couch. "He had that whole adolescent saviour complex thing going on big time."

"Saviour complex?" Bones repeated as she opened a file on her desk, glancing over it even as she took in his words.

"Yeah, teenage boys love nothing more than the idea of saving the damsel in distress," Booth said, smiling briefly at the memory of some of Xander and Oz's actions; even when they'd been dealing with women who were more than capable of defending themselves- Buffy had her Slayer strength from the beginning, and Willow and Cordelia weren't exactly weak even if they'd initially been shaken at the discovery of the truth about the world they lived in-, those two couldn't resist the urge to protect their partners, the girls' safety always their priority...

"How do you know?" Bones asked, looking at him with a slightly quizzical smile.

"Well," Booth said, deciding to go with the most obvious 'real' explanation for that knowledge- even if he hadn't been that type of teenage boy when he'd actually been one-, "cause I was, ya know, I was a teenage boy."

"Hey," Cam said, entering the office and placing a file on Bones's desk. "DNA from the tissue under the victim's fingernail. Female. And there's nail polish in the gouges on his arm."

"Well, it wasn't necessarily from the murder," Bones pointed out, putting the paper back on her desk. "They were sexually active. She might've scratched him."

"Nope," Cam said with a firm shake of her head. "Hodgins also found oxidized iron in the scratches."

"Oxidized iron," Booth repeated, looking at his former (He _remembered_ dating her, even if it technically hadn't 'really' happened) girlfriend as he walked over to lean on Bones's desk. "What's that?"

"Rust," Bones and Cam said simultaneously, looking at him as though they were surprised he didn't know that already.

"Why didn't you just say rust?" Booth asked; why these women liked to go for the more complicated answers he'd never understand...

"Well, she said it," Bones pointed out defensively.

"The same oxidized iron found on the victim's upper back and shoulder," Cam clarified.

"Probably left behind by the weapon that stuck him," Bones suggested.

"So," Booth asked, standing up from the desk to look thoughtfully at Cam, "he was hit with... what? A rusty pipe?"

"That's a reasonable assumption," Cam confirmed.

"Oh, so Dylan tells the girlfriend they're breaking up-" Booth began, the most immediate possibility springing to his mind as he turned over the facts in his head.

"She whacks him across the carotid with a pipe-" Cam continued.

"And pushes him out the window," Booth finished.

"Exactly," Cam said.

"What?" Booth asked, noticing Bones's slightly stunned-and-annoyed glare as she stared at him and Cam. "What's with the stink eyes? It's just a theory."

"There was cheap nail polish in the box of Kelly's belongings," Bones said, apparently so incensed at his assessment that she didn't even want to respond to his question. "You should see if there's a match."

"Find some hair," Cam said, turning back to look at him. "Match the DNA on that then get started on the, uh, murder weapon."

"Yeah," Booth said.

Without saying a word to them, Bones got up from her chair, picked up her jacket and headed for the door to her office.

"Where are you going?" Booth asked, looking at his partner in concern as she paused in the door to grab her lab coat.

"I thought that before we arrest Kelly Morris for murder, based _solely_ on the fact that she's a foster kid, we might want to find the place where Dylan Crane actually died," Bones replied, shrugging on her coat as she looked at the two of them. "Point of fact, the pipe, if that's even what it was, was not the murder weapon. The evidence, if anybody cares, shows that Dylan Crane died from a fall."

As the forensic anthropologist walked out of the office, Booth could only look quietly at Cam.

He'd always known that Bones cared about the victims, but he'd never seen her that vocally passionate about anything that didn't involve protecting evidence.

Even after working with her on a constant basis for the better part of a year, there were times when Bones could still manage to surprise him...

* * *

  
As he watched Cam carry out the autopsy of Kevin Duncan in the side lab that had become Cam's 'territory' ever since she'd started working in the Jeffersonian, he was only slightly surprised to learn that she'd requested Zack's assistance in the case; the young man might be Bones's assistant, but Cam seemed to be making a surprisingly effective effort to bond with him despite his weird social skills, as well as encouraging him to operate slightly outside of his usual 'comfort zone' of focusing on purely skeletal remains.

"Feeling queasy, Zack?" Cam asked, as she felt her way through Duncan's cut-open chest.

"I'm not used to bodies looking so much like actual human beings," Zack clarified. Smiling slightly at him in response, Cam started to cut into the bone with the saw, leaving Booth to look away for a few moments as she worked; even after what he remembered Angelus doing, there were times when he just wasn't in the mood to see more post-death 'mutilation', no matter how much he understood the necessity.

"Since this man was just killed and there's plenty of flesh, how is my presence beneficial?" Zack asked, only for Cam to respond as she finished her work with the saw and pulled a bone out of the rib cage, a bullet obviously lodged in it, and placed it in a tray in Zack's hands.

"The number six rib," Zack said, looking at the new object in understanding.

"The bullet passed through his vital organs and lodged in the rear curvature," Cam explained. "Get it out."

Nodding in response, Zack turned to walk away from the body and out of the lab, leaving Booth and Cam alone in the lab once again.

"So," Booth said, taking advantage of the silence as Zack left, "you're thinking the perv kills Romeo, and Juliet kills the pervert?"

"Street smart kid like Kelly Morris would have no trouble getting her hands on a gun," Cam said, prompting a thoughtful murmur from Booth; he acknowledged the theoretical point that she was making, but he didn't exactly think it was fair to assume that foster children would have no trouble getting their hands on weapons; Gunn had been fairly street smart and he probably wouldn't know where to _begin_ to look for a gun (Even if that was mainly because he'd never bothered as it would have been relatively useless against his usual enemies).

"Booth," Cam said, drawing his thoughts away from alternative possible explanations for the current crime, "if Dr. Brennan were to quit..."

"What?" Bones said, looking up at her after a moment's silence had passed since her last statement, wanting to be sure he'd heard her correctly before he responded to her query.

"If she were to leave the Jeffersonian-" Cam elaborated.

"Well, the squints would flee this institution like the French Army," Booth finished for her.

"And you?" Cam asked.

"Well, I do as I'm ordered..." Booth said, smiling awkwardly at her.

"No, you don't, Seeley," Cam said, which at least answered one question Booth had about her knowledge of him; even if he was part of a chain of command these days, he still didn't like taking orders when he didn't agree with them...

"OK, here we go," he said, ignoring the implications of the train of thought inspired by her last statement as he stood up and walked over to stand more directly in front of the smaller woman. "What's going on, Camille?"

"What if I fired her?" Cam asked, looking down at the floor for a moment before focusing her attention back on him. "What would you do?"

Booth wondered what it was about his life that meant that he always had to choose between one romantic partner or another whenever he was in a situation where his ex met his current relationship. He'd been lucky enough to avoid getting into that kind of situation after he developed feelings for Cordelia- he and Buffy had met during that whole thing with the dragon and Jhiera's return, but considering Cordelia's absence from the hotel at the time it wasn't that big an issue as the two of them weren't in the same place at the same time even if Cordelia hadn't been possessed at that point-, but when Buffy and Darla had come face-to-face he'd made the choice to save Buffy by staking Darla...

"I'm with Bones, Cam," he said, giving the pathologist the truthful response she was looking for. "All the way. Don't doubt it for a second."

"Meet the English Alba Rose," Hodgins said, walking into the lab before Cam could respond to his last statement- which at least spared Booth the complication of being potentially asked to define the reason for his chosen 'allegiance'-, a long-stemmed white rose in his hand. "Climbing varietal, nonexistent in the United States. Some say, it was the rose by any other name Shakespeare wrote about."

"And we give a rat's ass because...?" Booth asked, looking critically at the entomologist; if he was going to be interrupted during a difficult conversation, he'd like it to be for a good reason.

"It's what Dylan Crane was clutching in his cold, dead hand," Hodgins clarified.

"So... what?" Cam asked. "He was killed by Hamlet?"

"Wrong play," Hodgins corrected with a smile. "It's more likely he paid a visit to the rose wing of the United States Botanic Garden."

"When it comes to bugs, slime, crud and compost," Cam said, smiling in approval at his discovery, "you're the man."

Bowing briefly at the Jeffersonian's new head, Hodgins laughed slightly before he turned around and left the lab, leaving them to continue their earlier conversation.

"Look, Cam," Booth said, deciding to take a chance to tackle the previously-discussed issue as Hodgins left the lab, "maybe you just got off on the wrong foot with this case with Brennan because, uh... she was a foster kid."

"Oh," Cam said, looking upwards awkwardly and sighing in understanding as she processed this new information. "Why didn't she tell me?"

"She doesn't do that," Booth said, getting up from where he'd been leaning against a counter and walking towards the lab door, pausing as he reached a point beside Cam to lean over and address her in a lower voice "Oh, by the way, I didn't just tell you that."

Cam merely nodded in response as he continued to walk out of the lab, leaving him to wonder if what he'd done would make any difference to the relationship between his partner and her boss in the longer run...

* * *

  
Sitting in his apartment that night, Booth wondered how he should feel about the conclusion of the case.

He might have solved the murder, but the fact that that the whole mess had just been the result of a kid brother trying to protect his sister based on a misinterpretation of the facts...

It was almost more tragic that the 'Romeo and Juliet' analogies the team had been making throughout this whole case; at least they'd known about the dangers they were facing in trying to be together from the beginning, but Dylan and Kelly had just wanted to be together and give Alex a chance, and everything went wrong because he didn't realise what they were trying to do...

Still, at least Dylan and Kelly had tried to take the chances offered to them; they might not be together now, but they had been in a position where they'd had the chance, and they'd tried to take it.

People might call him a sap, but after everything he'd been through in his relationships with Buffy and Cordelia, both of which had fallen apart before he could really start something with Cordelia or due to horrific outside circumstances for Buffy, he liked to know that there were some people out there who still wanted to at least _try_ for that ever-elusive 'happy ever after'.

Love might not be all you needed, but if you had it, it made everything else seem possible... but sometimes, as Harmony had tried to point out to Wesley during the dark day of Illyria's resurrection and Fred's death, all you could do was enjoy the fact that you'd had the love of the love of your life for a time.

Booth just hoped that Kelly would find someone else to help her in that manner again eventually...


	27. The Blonde in the Game

As he sat opposite Howard Epps, Booth was almost surprised at how quickly he felt the urge to pummel the guy's face in returned with a vengeance.

He'd faced down most of Wolfram & Hart's chief lawyers and satisfied himself with threats when he was in a good mood- his attitude towards them during his 'dark phase' didn't really count, and cutting off Lindsey's hand had just been done to save Cordelia rather than any specific desire to cause Lindsey pain himself-, but just being in the same room as this handcuffed sociopath, who'd killed at least three women and found it amusing when he was meant to _have_ a soul...

"Who's this?" he said, removing a photograph from the file he'd brought to the interview and pointing at the girl shown in it; the best way to get anywhere with the likes of Epps was to hit them with the situation as directly as possible.

Despite his best intentions, he smiled as Epps's attempt to stand to look at the photo more clearly was cut short when his handcuffs and other assorted chains stopped him from rising more than a couple of inches out of his seat.

"Ohhh!" he said, grinning before assuming a mockingly serious expression as he sat down opposite the serial killer. "That's right, you're chained."

"How about removing these shackles?" Epps asked, bending over so that his face was close to Booth's despite his bonds remaining intact.

"The new, Howie," Booth said, refusing to acknowledge a request that Epps would have known wouldn't be granted anyway. "The name."

Staring at the photo, Epps didn't even bother to answer for a moment, but simply sat back down in his chair, staring blanking at Booth.

"You know," he said, squeezing his wrist slowly as he spoke in a sickeningly nonchalant tone, "those hack doctors and the prison infirmary... did a miserable job setting my wrist. It aches all the time, and I don't have a full range of movement. And let me tell you, when you're stuck in a prison cell for twenty-three hours a day, there's really only one thing you can do to pass the time. And I need my wrist."

"Well," Booth said, staring back at the prisoner, "I'm sure Doctor Brennan will be happy to... re-break it for you."

With that said, he picked up the file folder and tapped it on the table, deliberately drawing Epps' attention to it.

"What's that?" Epps asked.

"What, these?" Booth asked, his tone level. "These are crime scene photos, the ones you like. Tell you what. You, ah, you tell me the girl's name, I'll, uh, let you take a look."

"Everything you need to win the game is right there in front of you," Epps replied, a slight smile on his face that was only visible if you had experience with that kind of grin.

"Game?" Booth repeated, trying to ignore the disturbing implications of that particular term- especially when his own past as Angelus was taken into account- as he looked at Epps, his tone carefully chosen to make it sound like he'd been expecting this news. "You're bored, huh? Are you playing us?"

"When Doctor Brennan figures it out," Epps said, leaning towards Booth with an impassive expression, "come and see me again. But bring your lady scientist. Otherwise... I don't say a word."

"Next time you see either one of us," Booth retorted coldly, "they'll be giving you a lethal injection."

With that said, he stood up and walked out of the door as the guard opened it for him, leaving Epps to sit in his chains and wait for nothing to happen.

Booth might have operated on a principle of giving people second chances when he'd been Angel, but they had to deserve those chances before he offered them, and so far Epps was lower scum than Lindsey as far as he was concerned...

* * *

  
Walking into the 'M' Salon as another customer departed, Booth tried not to pay too much attention to the photograph of Caroline with Howard Epps that he could just see sitting next on one of the shelves; the thought that anyone could actually want to _marry_ that guy, _knowing_ what he'd done...

"Hi," he said, smiling politely at Caroline as she registered his presence, flipping the sign on the door behind him to indicate that the store was closed; this was definitely a conversation that should be held in private.

"Is-is Howard OK?" Caroline asked.

"Howard's fine, Mrs Epps; you don't have to worry about anything," Booth said, leaning against a nearby glass shelf as he smiled reassuringly at her. "I couldn't help but notice the 'Help Wanted' sign in the window. Did you recently lose one of your employees?"

"It's, uh, hard to keep help that doesn't steal from you," Caroline said, walking out from behind the desk to place some items on a stylist's station.

"Sarah Koskoff steal from you?" Booth asked, after glancing at a bottle of hair product to give a more nonchalant impression about the question.

"No," Caroline replied, looking at him in confusion through the mirror before she returned to her work. "Why? What did she do?"

"She died," Booth said, carefully watching her reaction as she turned to look at him. "You know, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you... but when was the last time you saw her?"

"Uh, three weeks ago," Caroline replied, looking at him in confused shock. "She just... stopped coming to work. She-she died?"

"Did you ever, uh, talk to Howard about her?" Booth asked, sitting down in a nearby chair as he watched Caroline's reaction.

"Uh... I don't know," Epps's wife replied uncertainly. "Maybe..."

"Howard ever see a picture of Sarah?" Booth asked before Caroline could finish thinking about that last question; rapid-fire questions encouraged honest answers.

"I-I don't like this," Caroline said, looking at him in confusion. "What's going on?"

"She was found buried face down in an abandoned mine," Booth replied, staring intently at her. "Back of her head bashed in; wrists, ankles tied. Your husband's M.O."

"Poor Sarah," Caroline said, turning away to look at the mirror, an expression of sorrow that Booth couldn't determine the nature of; it could be genuine, or it could just as easily be that of a good actress...

"But Howard..." Caroline said, turning to look at Booth after staring at her picture of Epps. "Howard has been in prison for the last seven years; how could he kill anyone?"

"He has an accomplice," Booth informed her, allowing her to draw her own conclusions regarding his reasons for mentioning that fact.

"You think it's me?" Caroline asked, clearly shocked at the idea.

"You love your husband," Booth pointed out.

"I love the good in Howard; I reject the evil," Caroline replied, with a smile of almost disturbing joy (Booth wasn't sure if he should be disturbed at the reminder of his relationship with Buffy; she might have been able to see past Angelus's sins, but at least they'd both _known_ that he wasn't the man who'd done those things and was working to atone for his past). "I reject the evil. We're going to have a child together. I've petitioned the court to let Howard donate."

"Yeah," Booth said, clearing his throat- he wasn't touching _that_ topic any more than he had to- before he returned to business. "I have a search warrant here for your home and your shop."

"You don't need a search warrant," Caroline said. "You can look anywhere you want, because you won't find anything."

Once again, her expression- although slightly grimmer towards the end of her statement- gave no indication whether she genuinely had nothing to hide or if she was just really good at keeping secrets (And the fact that she was at least _slightly_ mad for being interested in a psychopath like Epps in the first place didn't exactly help him come to a conclusion one way or the other).

* * *

  
As he walked into the abandoned post office, Bones carrying a flashlight behind him, Booth made a mental note to take Hodgins out for a drink or something later on; the guy might be able to easily afford to buy his own _bar_ if he wanted, but the essential sentiment of getting out for a bit of R&R after a very difficult experience wasn't something that should be overlooked.

Hodgins might have been operating far outside of his usual comfort zone when making that deduction/guess for them earlier, but he'd pulled through in the end- with Angela's help, anyway- and would hopefully be better prepared to make that kind of assessment in future if this kind of situation arose again (Not that Booth _wanted_ to be in this position again, and he fully understood Hodgins' reasons for freaking out- the guy was used to finding information in the aftermath, not having to make a potentially life-or-death decision on his feet-, but it was best to be prepared for the worst).

Now the only challenge was if they'd find Helen Majors in this post office sorting centre before everything came to the kind of conclusion that he _really_ didn't want; even if Hodgins was right about this place, he'd probably still have trouble forgiving himself if it turned out that they'd arrived here too late to help their would-have-been victim...

Still, the abandoned sorting centre idea made sense based on what Hodgins had told them and what they knew of this new apprentice; all they had to do now was find their victim in this mini-maze.

"All right," he said, reaching down to pull a small pistol out of his ankle holster and handing it to Bones; considering the potential danger of the current situation, it would probably be best to get the whole argument about whether or not his partner should have a gun out of the way and give it to her now. "Here."

"I didn't even have to ask," Bones said, taking the gun automatically.

"Yeah, well, just be careful, all right?" Booth said, glancing around himself as he and Bones walked slowly through the centre, searching for some sign of the woman they were here to help or the killer they were here to stop. "Don't shoot me, don't shoot Helen Majors; otherwise-"

The sound of chains rattling prompted that discussion to come to a halt, Booth exchanging a glance with Bones as they evaluated the possible source of the sound before progressing along the makeshift corridor they were currently in. Finally reaching an entryway a short distance down the corridor, they glanced inside and found themselves looking at Helen Majors, crying softly as she hung upside-down with a chain around her ankles.

"Please..." the girl sobbed, seemingly saying the word automatically as she hung facing away from the window that allowed them to see her. "Please..."

Booth glanced at Bones before hurrying around the corner, quickly finding a more direct route to the hanging girl than crashing through the door; right now, the clearly terrified girl didn't need more shocks than she had to receive.

"Helen?" Booth asked, holstering his gun as he hurried up to her.

"Please..." Helen said, still crying despite the sound of a new voice. "Please help me..."

"All right," Booth said, Bones switching on a nearby light as he walked over to Helen and picked her up from underneath, supporting her as Bones helped to lower the chain holding her in place until she was lying on the ground. "OK, take it easy; I got you... I got you, I got you, all right? Where is he?"

"He just left," Helen said, still sobbing in terror. "I don't know where he went."

"Bones, stay here with her," Booth said, looking up at his partner as she finished lowering Helen's legs to the ground. "Stay right there."

With that instruction issued, he pulled out his gun and left the room, Bones and Helen's voices quickly becoming nothing but background noise as he walked through the abandoned storage centre, flashlight aimed in various different directions as he searched for the killer that was the focus of his current efforts. He was just turning around a corner near what looked like an old printing press when something leapt on him from the shadows, striking his arm with a crowbar and forcing Booth to release his gun and flashlight from the shock of the impact, the following attack only just missing Booth as he rolled away. His reflexes slower than they would have been if he'd been attacked as Angel, Booth could only roll out of the way to avoid the second attempted attack, but quickly found himself pinned and out of space after avoiding a third attempt. For a moment, he could only stare up at the man who could only be Lappin, dressed in what looked like a brown leather apron and a dark shirt, as he raised the crowbar for a final time, before a gunshot brought the attacker to a halt.

Lappin turned just enough to see Bones staring at him, the gun and a flashlight in her hands and her eyes wide with horror, before blood oozed from his mouth and he dropped the crowbar before collapsing to the ground himself, leaving Booth to slowly get back to his feet as Bones slowly walked forward, the gun and flashlight still held out in front of her as though frozen in position.

"Is he dead?" Booth asked, looking up at his partner before processing that she was currently too shaken to check herself, prompting him to reach over and check the other man's neck for himself.

"Yeah, he's dead," he said, finding no sign of life at the pulse before he fell back to the ground with a groan; the last blow to his arm had been more effective than it had initially seemed.

As though those words had been a cue, Bones's arms dropped, visibly relieved, even as her mouth opened in shock at what she had just done, simply staring at Lappin's vacant expression.

"Good," Booth said, nodding at her as he sat up, cradling his injured arm as he leaned against the printing press beside him.

"I had to shoot him," Bones said, sounding more lost and shaken than she had ever expressed in his previous experience.

"Yeah," Booth said, nodding at her with all the reassurance he could spare while still trying to process the shock of recent events. "I'm glad you did."

He felt the inadequacy of that statement as soon as he uttered it, but there was nothing else that he could do right now to console his partner's reaction to what had happened.

He'd helped his friends in Sunnydale and Los Angeles train, but he'd never been there to help the first time they'd had to kill something (Mainly because they so rarely tried to kill anything they'd actually have to feel guilty about killing)...

* * *

  
Standing opposite Howard Epps once again, Booth wondered what made him more frustrated; that Epps had set all of this up while in prison, or just how goddamn _smug_ he was about the whole thing (The fact that he was in a cast didn't help matters; it might be a hangover from the time he'd spent as the supernatural healer, but Booth _hated_ showing weakness even if he couldn't control something like how long he'd take to heal).

"Well done," Epps said, almost sounding approving of their actions. "Really."

"Game's over, Howie," Booth said firmly.

"Yes," Epps said, smiling faintly in what Booth didn't need Angelus's expertise to tell him was self-satisfaction. "I won."

"Only if you wanted your accomplice dead," Bones said, sitting down cautiously in front of Epps to better look him in the eye.

"Lappin's dead?" Epps said.

"Shot resisting arrest," Booth confirmed.

"Who shot him?" Epps asked. Booth said nothing in response, but a faint mumble from Bones was apparently enough to answer Epps's question. "It was you, wasn't it?"

Bones lifted her chin in slight defiance, but otherwise said nothing to confirm or deny the killer's assessment.

"You shot him?" Epps asked, still staring at Bones for clarification. "Did he take long to die?"

Bones continued her silence, simply clenching her jaw.

"Did he suffer?" Epps asked, Booth's eyes automatically narrowing at the tone of the other man's voice as his gaze briefly shifted to Booth. "This is better than I thought; I thought it would be you."

With that comment he turned his attention back to Bones, not even bothering to wait for Booth to respond to his comment. "How did it feel? Dirty, yes? But there's also a rush... of pleasure. Part of you liked it."

Looking back, that was one part of Angelus that Booth sometimes found himself missing; the belief that everyone else was just as twisted as you were made it so much easier to kill the other guy when you were _really_ angry at them...

Angelus could do that.

Hell, even _Angel_ was willing to go that far when faced with some of his foes.

But Booth...

It was the downside of facing humans when he himself was only human; you constantly felt obligated to give them a shot to make up for what they'd done because it was what you'd like people to do for you, even if people like Epps made it constantly clear that they didn't deserve it.

"This whole game was to have us kill someone?" Bones asked, his partner apparently ignorant of his attention or thoughts as he looked at her.

"Who's going to tell Lappin's mom?" Epps asked, nothing on his face but a morbid curiosity that once again reminded Booth of expressions he'd felt his face assuming as Angelus; even the sympathetic tone of his voice was too mocking to ever be considered remotely sincere. "She loves him very much, you know. Without her son, she'll be completely alone in this sad world."

Nothing the sudden sympathy on Bones's face, Booth stepped forward firmly; he _wasn't_ going to let his partner feel regret for killing someone who'd been willing to torture an innocent girl for kicks.

"We're done with you," he said, refusing to continue this conversation as he glanced down at his partner, wanting to get her away from this monster's presence. "You're never going to see us again; come on."

"I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that, Agent Booth," Epps said as Bones got up to leave after a last hard stare at the serial killer.

Stuck for ideas about the best way to verbally respond to that statement, Booth simply glared at the other man for a few moments before he followed her out of the room, leaving one of the few living men he'd ever met who was as twisted as Angelus to his lifetime sentence.

If he never saw that bastard again, he'd consider himself lucky...

* * *

  
Looking at Bones as she sat in the upper level of the lab that night, hunched over on a couch with a glass in her hand, Booth couldn't recall the last time he'd seen his partner so shaken.

She'd had to deal with a lot when she'd learned the truth about her parents, but none of that had really changed who _she_ was; she'd just had to definitively kill another living being and face up to the part of herself that was capable of something like that...

"Vodka?" he asked, maintaining a slight distance in case she preferred solitude right now but remaining close in case she wanted company.

"It's water," Bones replied, shaking her glass slightly to indicate the ice inside it. "But it's on the rocks."

"You know, Bones, I'm not sure you grasp the basic theory on how to get drunk," Booth said, wincing as he hung his coat over his injured arm before pulling up a chair and sitting down in it as he continued to speak. "What you need to do is order a shot of hard liquor from a barman named Shaky, and tell him to, uh, leave the bottle in the bar."

"I'm fine, Booth," Bones said, even as he stared at her, Booth simply nodding slightly in an idly indulgent manner at her oh-too-casual tone. "I'm sitting here thinking about it, and... I'm fine."

"OK," Booth said, looking thoughtfully at her. "So what I'm gettin' from you here, Bones, is that you're fine."

He didn't need his years of experience of human nature to know that Bones was anything but fine, but he simply sat and looked at her as she reached over to pick up a photograph of Sarah Koskoff from the investigation file that they'd been consulting earlier.

"He murdered Sarah," Bones said, as she looked at the photograph. "He was about to murder Helen. You know, why should I feel upset about shooting him? You know, I mean, if I was going to be upset, which I'm not… it would be because Epps thinks he beat us, so-"

"He didn't," Booth said.

"I know," Bones said, looking down as she spoke.

"You're upset because you think he beat us," Booth said, letting Bones look up at him as he nodded in resolution, as though having just come to a decision. "You know what? He did."

"Beat us?" Bones asked, looking at him in surprise.

"Yeah," Booth confirmed.

"Well, you just said that he didn't," Bones said, looking at him in confusion.

"Well, I changed my mind," Booth said.

"What, in the last three seconds?" Bones asked, looking at him in shock.

"You know, you're afraid that Epps turned you into him; into a killer," Booth said, looking firmly at his partner as she looked at him, a vulnerability about her manner that he had never seen her express; quite frankly, in this moment, she reminded him more of Fred and Willow in the early days of his friendship with them, rather than the Buffy or Cordelia-esque confidence she'd always demonstrated in the past. "You have to... come to grips with the fact that you killed another human being."

He paused for a moment as he looked down, lost in his memories of his own past sins; he'd never killed as Liam, and he'd more than paid for any responsibility he might bear for Angelus's crimes- he was still the person who'd let Darla turn him, even if he couldn't have known what she was offering-, but the questionable things he'd done as Angel, to say nothing of the people he'd killed as Booth...

"Because when you kill someone," he continued, looking back at her solemnly, "you know, there's a cost. It's a steep cost. I know. I've done it."

He'd done it so many times he sometimes didn't know how he'd ever manage to feel like his hands were clean again, but what he'd done in the past in no way compared to what Doctor Temperance Brennan had done to Gil Lappin, and she needed to understand that.

"I did the right thing," Bones said after a moment's reflection, her tone weary despite the positive nature of the statement.

"I know," Booth said, looking her in the eye as she looked back at him, the faint gleam of tears in her eyes, the woman who had always been so strong unconsciously seeking reassurance about the rightness of her actions as they exchanged brief smiles. "I was there."

"Oh," Bones said, looking down shamefully as a tear fell on the photograph that she was still holding. "Look what I did."

"It doesn't matter," Booth said, looking solemnly at her.

"It does," Bone said, and Booth knew she wasn't just talking about the teardrop. "It matters."

Looking at her, Booth knew that it was going to take his partner a while to reach full comfort with what she'd done, but progress was being made; as with everything worthwhile, the journey was necessary so that the end result could be appreciated, but Bones was never one to back down from the hard road.

 _Of course_ , he thought to himself, as he felt the small plastic pig in his pocket, _that doesn't mean I can't remind her of she is before anything else..._


	28. The Truth in the Lye

As crime scenes went, Booth was sometimes surprised that construction sites weren't something he visited more regularly; plenty of potential murder weapons, various locations to dump the body, and generally they were so open that it would be hard for anyone to really track down the murderer in the aftermath...

"Sorry if I interrupted anything," Bones said as the two of them walked into the site- he wondered if she'd just kept quiet about it earlier out of some sense of respecting his wishes-, Bones already wearing a blue hat while he carried a yellow one.

"What?" Booth said, trying not to think about what she actually had interrupted- somehow, Rebecca was one of those human aspects that he was never sure about; he enjoyed the ability to not worry about his curse, but it just felt somehow empty when he _knew_ it wasn't going to go too far even when it had the potential to be more- as he looked at her while fiddling with the mask and helmet he'd been provided with. "Oh! No, no, you didn't."

"Good," Bones said.

"OK," Booth said, feeling a sudden need to clarify the situation at the sight of his partner's smile. "But if you must know, you know, Rebecca, my ex… she stopped by my place to pick up a comic that I got Parker."

"OK," Bones said, still smiling.

"She just so happened to pick up the phone," Booth said, already feeling stupid for saying this but hoping it would be enough for the socially-ignorant Doctor Temperance Brennan. "That's it, you know? Nothing more, nothing less."

"I'm sorry," Bones said, as they turned a corner to enter the building, a bored tone to her voice. "Did I say I must know?"

As they walked into an unfinished bathroom in an equally unfinished condominium, Booth's thoughts on further protest ended as the stench coming from the bathtub in the middle of the room hit his nostrils, a closer look at the tub revealing a thick-looking brown liquid that put whatever response Booth might have made to that statement out of his head, a pale leg sticking out and various pieces floating in the tube that could have been human body parts even if Booth couldn't immediately identify which bit was which.

"Ooh, very nice," he said, groaning as he pulled on a mask even as Bones pulled out a tape recorder.

"Age and sex undetermined," Bone said, pausing to sniff the material in front of her as she spoke. "Victim is immersed in a pool of... what smells like a composite of domestic corrosives-"

"It smells more like, uh-" Booth began.

"Common drain declogger, acid wash, bleach," Bones interjected (It was probably for the best; the only things Booth could compare the scent to didn't exist in Bones's scientific world). "Submerged two to three days."

"All right," Booth said, taking the mask off now that his nose had adjusted to the reek- as a vampire, you had to adapt to bad smells fairly quickly since you were aware of so many that the average human would never really notice- as he indicated the tub, "are you saying that he's been here all weekend just dissolving?"

"Allowing the killer time for the corrosives to do their thing," Bones said, her tone contemplative as she circled the tub.

"Excuse me, can I get in here, please?" a man said from behind Booth, the agent turning around to look at a tanned man with slightly curly black hair in a brown leather jacket and pale shirt, looking impatiently back at him. "Yeah, I'm Pete Valero. I'm the development contractor."

"OK," Booth said, nodding in acknowledgement of the other man's identification of himself.

"Yeah," Valero said as he walked into the room. "I came as soon as-"

The sight of the tub bubbling left Valero turning around to vomit into the still-unfinished sink; evidently, whether human or vampire, Booth still had a stronger stomach than the average man.

"There could be evidence in there," Bones said, pointing at Valero and the sink.

"I'd say most of it's right in there," Booth pointed out, his attention focused on the tub.

"I'll need Zack to help me extract the remains and whatever else is beneath the surface," Bones continued, her attention back on the case

"Wouldn't it be a lot easier if we took the whole tub?" Booth asked, shrugging as he indicated the object in question; it would be heavy, but it didn't strike him as something they couldn't handle…

"No, no, no, wait," Valero said (Why was it people could get sick when discussing death but be perfectly willing to discuss what Booth was certain would be a financial matter?). "That- that tub is a- is a Godive 3000. These things aren't cheap."

"Oh, do you think anybody is actually gonna want this Godive 3000 after this?" Booth asked.

"Well, would they have to know?" Valero asked, prompting a scoff from Bones that Booth only didn't mimic out of his desire to maintain a degree of professionalism. "Look, I'm just saying, with subsidized housing, the government wants every nickel accounted for."

"I'll get you a receipt," Booth said, looking at the man as another line of questioning occurred to him, "if you can tell me why the boss of the job is just showing up right now."

"I was at the dentist," Valero said, looking at Booth before his gaze shifted to the tub. "I got a call in the middle of a root canal. Who knew I'd be better off there?"

"Do you know who this is?" Booth asked, pointing at the tub (A long shot, considering the visible state of the body, but he felt obliged to ask).

"How would I know?" Valero asked, as Bones pulled on gloves and began to examine the tub's contents using various tongs that probably had some technical name Booth wasn't immediately remembering. "I got over two hundred workers on this site alone… not to mention all the kids and the- the vandals coming through here on the weekend."

His attempted defence was cut short when he turned to look at the tub, just as Bones pulled out something that Booth didn't need his training to identify as skin without anything inside it.

"Oh my God..." Valero said, turning away with a sick expression as he ran towards the door.

"Oh God," Booth groaned, as the man who was moving onto the suspects list began to leave the scene.

"Bones!" he said, glaring at his partner before he looked at Valero, indicating the basic 'corridor' outside the unfinished door. "Wait out there."

"It's only skin," Bones said, holding up the object with the tongs. "OK, I'll need that window, a forklift, and a flatbed."

"Why?" Booth asked.

"You called it," Bones said, tapping the tub for clarification. "We want answers, the tub is coming with us."

As she pulled out what seemed to be a person's hair after they'd been literally scalped, Booth tried not to remember the last time he'd faced something capable of reducing a grown man to nothing but loose skin.

He might have eventually managed to adjust to the idea that he'd fall victim to old age eventually after beginning his life as Seeley Booth, but what Marcus Roscoe had done to others still left him feeling sick; innocent young men, sacrificed in the name of nothing more than Marcus's pathetic desire to recapture his youth...

If this was anything like what he'd dealt with then, he really wasn't looking forward to this case; he wasn't sure he'd be able to resist the temptation to punch whoever was responsible for killing off young men because he couldn't accept that his glory days had passed, and that was assuming that they could find a 'legitimate' reason to suspect whoever was behind this without bringing magic into it.

* * *

  
"I was not gossiping," Bones said, as she examined something under a microscope back in the Jeffersonian's forensic lab, Booth reclining in a chair to take advantage of the temporary opportunity to get off his feet while the victim's bones lay on a table beside her.

"Oh, really?" he said, looking sceptically at her. "So then what would you call it?"

"Merely sharing a point of interest," Bones said.

"Great," Booth said, standing up and walking towards her. "So now what am I, huh? The world's largest ball of string?"

"Not you, your behaviour," Bones said, lifting her head up from the microscope to turn and look at him with that same almost blank expression that made him so frustrated at times; she never seemed to understand why what she was saying would get on others' nerves. "It was a textbook example of just how helpless we higher primates can be to our biological urges."

"I am not helpless," Booth said, wishing that he didn't find himself suddenly thinking of how things had been with Buffy after he returned from Hell; that had been hard because they'd been unable to give themselves one single perfect night to make up for the last one, _not_ because they'd been unable to control their hormones!

OK, so he'd enjoyed the relationship with Nina because it had been easier to deal with the whole mess going on in his life with a pleasant, relatively innocent person to spend time with who knew what he was and accepted him without making him _too_ happy, but sex hadn't been _that_ big a deal about it…

"He's not elderly," Bones said, as she turned her attention back to the microscope.

"I can control my- who?" Booth asked, his initial protest forgotten when faced with Bones's sudden change of topic.

"Our victim," Bones explained, stepping back from the microscope to indicate the display on the attached screen that meant virtually nothing to Booth (Cell structures and modern art were so confusing he sometimes got the two mixed up even after over a year of regular contact with the Jeffersonian staff). "You see these marrow cells? The lack of collagen indicates osteogenesis imperfecta. Brittle bone disease."

"And that's supposed to tell me he's not... old?" Booth asked; to him, it sounded like it could indicate exactly that.

"Not necessarily," Bones clarified, before her expression suddenly became curious. "And if you're not helpless, then why did you sleep with her?"

"Oh, I really don't recall saying that I did," Booth countered before he could stop himself (He should have just ignored that statement and tried to stay on topic), trying to keep his voice low to avoid attracting too much attention to this conversation.

"You didn't have to," Bones said, her voice at its regular volume as she smiled at him. "I could hear it in your voice. I might as well as walked in on you having sex."

"You didn't and we weren't," Booth said, turning around to walk away before this got any more frustrating.

"Well, it's nothing to be ashamed of, Booth," Bones said, clearly not interpreting his signal to end this discussion, forming him to turn around and smile at her out of a lack of any alternative responses he could make as his partner continued speaking. "Humans act upon a hierarchy of needs, and sex is very highly ranked. It's an anthropological inevitability."

"Thank you, Bones," Booth said, looking at her in exasperation, "I really appreciate you boiling me down to your anthropological inevitabilities."

"Sure," Bones said, her slightly confused expression at least suggesting she was aware that he wasn't happy even if she wasn't clear on what to do about it.

"Any time," Booth said.

"You know," Bones said, her attention back on the case, "if our victim had brittle bone, there could be a web site of some kind. He might have been listed."

It wasn't one of his strong areas of research, but at least it was something that he could look into without needing to be in a position where he'd potentially have to continue this awkward conversation.

* * *

  
"Unbelievable," Bones said, as the two of them walked out of the interrogation room after the last interview with Larry Turner/Seaver/whatever's two wives and one mistress.

"Yeah, you got that right," Booth said, glad to find himself in agreement with his partner on what would clearly be a key part of the case. "You know what? They're lying."

"How do you know?" Bones asked, as they began to walk along the corridor

"Oh, come on," Booth said. "They've been lying since day one. Between all of them, they should have a dozen Oscars by now."

"I know what those are," Bones said, pointing in understanding at him.

"I mean, come on, _suicide_?" Booth asked, as they began to walk away from the interrogation room and down the corridor towards Booth's office. "Bird shot, or not, okay, every self-inflicted I've seen, the guy shoots himself, and he drops the gun. Right? It's an automatic reaction. Bang, drop. There's no way the gun ends up in his mouth."

"Then we'd better go dig up that gun," Bones said.

"Seeley," a familiar voice said, prompting Booth to turn and look at Rebecca as she walked towards them, dressed in a dark dress as she smiled at him.

"I'll get the ball rolling," Bones said, before she turned to walk along the corridor, leaving Booth to look awkwardly at the mother of his child.

"Was that Doctor Brennan?" Rebecca asked, a slight edge to her voice that made it clear that she knew who he'd just been talking to and had said that just to break the ice.

"Uh-huh," Booth said, focusing his mind on the most relevant issue right now. "Why are you here?"

"I needed to know if you were going to coach Parker's T-ball team this year," Rebecca replied.

"You know I always coach Parker's T-ball team," Booth said; he didn't need her initial uncertainty to know that she was lying about that being the reason for her presence here.

"I didn't want to assume-" Rebecca began.

"OK, whoa; what is going on here, Rebecca?" Booth asked, pulling her into the nearby empty conference room, closing the door behind them before resuming the conversation. "Because, look, I thought we agreed here; we cannot end up groping each other in the FBI closet. We can't do that. We're done."

"I know," Rebecca said.

"Really?" Booth replied, actually surprised at the directness of the statement; he'd been so prepared for an argument he actually wasn't sure what to do now that there wasn't going to be one.

"Seeley, all the excuses I gave you for not wanting to get married…my independence, your work…" Rebecca began.

"I know," Booth said, not wanting to give her the chance to finish that sentence; he had always known that he wasn't father material after all the mistakes he'd made when raising Connor, no matter how enthusiastically he'd tried to make up for them with Parker…

"No, you don't," Rebecca said, looking at him with a solemn yet satisfied expression on her face that somehow relaxed all of Booth's fears even as she spoke. "You are a wonderful father. And Parker is a lucky kid. Such a lucky kid."

Booth had no idea what to say to that; after the lengths he'd had to go through to try and save Connor from his own mistakes, to hear that he _could_ be a good father to anyone…

"And obviously, we still have feelings for each other…" Rebecca said, her voice trailing off as she looked at him with a slightly seductive smile. "Do you still wanna marry me?"

"Rebecca…" Booth said, looking at her for a moment, suddenly lost in his memories of what could have been, the possibilities that had ended so long ago…

He couldn't do it.

They'd had a good relationship, but he would have been involved with her for all the wrong reasons, and he would be restarting it for those same wrong reasons; Rebecca deserved to be loved for herself, rather than loved by a man who had started the relationship because he was seeking to redefine his identity and was reminded of his 'type'.

"No," he said, the silence that had settled over them needing to be dispelled. "I don't."

"I don't want to marry you either," Rebecca said, inclining her head in acknowledgement of the deeper meaning behind this conversation, the two staring silently at each other for a moment before Rebecca reached into her bag and took out a small sheet of paper. "Here are the forms for T-Ball. I'll miss you."

"Yeah," Booth said, understanding what she meant. "And I'm gonna miss you too."

"You know what I'm gonna miss the most?" Rebecca asked, the hint of a smile on her lips as she tilted her head at him.

"Yeah," Booth said. "But let's not go there."

As Rebecca left, a smile on her face, Booth leaned against the door as he looked after her, a smile fighting to emerge on his face as he contemplated what they'd just discussed.

He _was_ a good father…

Somehow, more than the satisfaction of knowing that their complicated relationship had finally achieved a kind of definition that he had been looking for ever since she rejected his proposal.

* * *

  
"So, you never said how it ended up with Rebecca," Bones asked, Booth sitting in her office as she looked over a file.

"Well, yeah, it ended," Booth said, looking away from his partner; now that he had to discuss it, he wasn't entirely sure how to best phrase it. "The only time we'll ever spend together is with Parker."

"You sure that's what you want?" Bones asked, looking at him as she put the file down on her desk.

"You know what, Bones?" Booth said, looking back at her as she walked around the desk to look thoughtfully at him. "It might be all anthropology to you, but there are certain people that you just can't sleep with."

He found himself initially remembering Darla, but he pushed that aside; saving her had been about a deranged belief that he was redeeming himself by redeeming her, not because he just wanted to have sex with her.

"I mean, you can pretend that it's just sex," he said, recalling some of the times he'd tried to convince himself to risk it all for a last night with Buffy and all of the arguments he'd used to stop himself. "You can lie to yourself, and you can say that it's all good. But, um, there's just- There's too many strings and- and too much at stake, you know? Too much to lose."

"Yeah," Bones said, smiling slightly in acknowledgement of some kind of understanding. "I can see that."

"It's over, you know?" he said, standing up from the couch that he'd been sitting on. "I'd appreciate, you know, your support in that."

"I will," Bones said, after a moment's silence as she apparently processed the request. "And if you should slip, I will… keep my mouth shut about it."

"Thank you," Booth said. "But, I mean, it's not like I'm gonna-"

"No, I mean with anybody," Bones clarified. "I'm sure Rebecca's not your only option for satisfying your biological urges."

The subsequent eye contact was broken when Angela and Hodgins walked into the office, saving Booth from having to analyse that 'moment' in more depth than it might deserve.

"Please tell me these women are not going to jail," Angela asked, looking in frustration at the two of them as though they were personally responsible for whatever sentence the women would receive for simply discovering the body of the man who'd been cheating on all of them.

"After trying to bilk the insurance system, I imagine they'll get nothing less than a firing squad," Hodgins said firmly.

"Not if they never filed a claim," Angela protested.

"Because our friends here caught them," Hodgins pointed out.

"Well, you're both kinda right," Booth said, feeling inexplicably awkward at the interruption (He wasn't feeling this way because of _that_ ; it would just make everything too complicated). "Given their kids and the circumstances, the D.A. is gonna offer probation provided that all three women show remorse and attend mandatory counselling."

"In exchange for movie rights, I hope," Hodgins said, grinning over at Angela. "You know they're gonna get calls."

"I hope so," Angela said, Hodgins walking away as Angela turned her attention to Booth with a slight smile. "Hey, nice going by the way; Cam tells me you're back with your ex."

"Cam," Booth said; somehow, he had a feeling that 'Cam' hadn't been the one to reveal that particular item of trivia.

"Mmm," Angela said, nodding at him with a slight smile.

"Cam in her office?" he asked, getting up and leaving the room before the atmosphere could become any more awkward.

He wasn't sure how this upcoming conversation was going to go down, but he had a good feeling about this upcoming turn of events…


	29. The Girl in Suite 2103

"Special Agent Booth," the familiar voice of Alex Radswell said as he walked up to them, the short man's commanding presence somehow still managing to draw Booth's attention despite the devastation around them matching what he'd witnessed in some of the grimmer parts of Hell, "and I'm going to assume this is Doctor Brennan?"

"Bones," Booth said, looking at his partner as he indicated the new arrival, "Alex Radswell; he's, uh, from State Department."

"Why'd you say it like that?" Bones asked, even as Booth tried to avoid further questions by glancing at his notes; he tried to avoid it, but even if Radswell wasn't intimidating, he was good at making people feel uncomfortable.

"Booth believes the State Department was put on Earth to protect bad guys from the FBI," Radswell said with a slight smile.

"I count three dead?" Bones asked, shining her flashlight around the room.

"Four," Radswell corrected. "There's one behind the bar, already ID'd as the bartender. This was a cocktail party after a conference on drug trafficking in South America. The keynote speaker was Colombian judicial attaché Dolores Ramos."

"Did she survive?" Bones asked, glancing around the room.

"Minor burns, smoke inhalation," Radswell said dismissively. "She'll be fine. Luck of the draw."

"You seem uncomfortable," Bones said, looking at Booth as she indicated Radswell (Why was it that his partner could never be socially unobservant when it _mattered_?). "Does his size make you self-conscious?"

"Bones…" Booth said, once again regretting his partner's tactlessness; there were times he found the reminder to Cordelia comforting, and other times- particularly when he was already in an awkward situation- when it really got on his nerves.

"It's a condition; skeletal dysplasia," Bones said, before looking curiously at Radswell. "Pseudoachondroplasia or S.E.D. congenita?"

"Bones!" Booth said, hissing her as Radswell stared at her in a nonplussed manner, clearly uncertain if he was being mocked.

"Doctor Brennan," Radswell said, taking advantage of the brief distraction as Bones turned to look at Booth, "I can see that you're a straightforward person, and as much as I appreciate that quality, what you're asking me is neither your business nor relevant."

"But it's my business because I'm a forensic anthropologist," Bones replied, before she turned her attention back to the room. "But you're right, it's not relevant."

"So, what happened here?" Booth asked, eager to get back to the central topic; even without his uncomfortable memories of how judging by appearances had caused him to kill a demon champion, he just wasn't in the mood to discuss unusual appearances. "Bomb?"

"The blast came from the room next door," Radswell said, indicating the corner of the room where some of the FBI techs were working. "Your people are working on the cause right now."

"I'm betting Colombian drug types," Cam said, as she entered from the hole in the wall leading to the other room. "They just love blowing people up."

"Before she was attached to the embassy, Dolores Ramos was a prosecutor in Bogota," Radswell said- Booth took a moment to glance at Cam and suddenly found himself feeling awkward as she smiled at him-, the ex-vampire continuing to take notes. "She had plenty of enemies in the cartels."

"You ID anyone else beside the bartender?" Booth asked.

"Hector Madure," Radswell said, indicating the body of a dark-skinned man just behind him. "Chief of police from Quito, Ecuador."

"I brought you in to confirm the identity of his wife," Cam said, holding up a photo. "She's the extra crispy one."

"Father Gabriel Ruiz," Radswell said, pointing at another body as Bones walked over to join Cam. "He ran a drug program for kids in Bogota."

"Well, you know, it's a big score for the drug cartels," Booth said, looking thoughtfully at the bodies. "Any one of these people, you know, make a good target."

"I'm gonna check on the conditions of the survivors," Radswell said, as he indicated a less damaged part of the room. "You need anything, just holler."

"Will do," Booth said, before walking over to where his partner was examining the body she'd been brought in to look at; hopefully they could get this case sorted out and be on their way before he had to spend longer dealing with the State Department than was absolutely necessary…

* * *

  
"Lisa wasn't scheduled to work last night," Denise said, the other waitress proving to be a potentially useful witness even if Booth wondered what it said about a hotel where their bar could be mistaken for a nightclub. "She just came in on her own as a customer, picked up a guy."

"You know anything about him?" Booth asked; the sooner he could work out whether the extra victim in that bomb had been the focus of the blast or an unfortunate additional casualty, the happier he'd be.

"Looked Hispanic," Denise said uncertainly. "That's not P.C. to say, but you want details, right?"

Booth hummed in response; he wasn't officially condoning the word choice, but he appreciated the additional clue it provided them with.

"And it looked like he had money too," Denise added.

"How tall was he?" Booth asked.

"I don't know, he was sitting down when I saw him," Denise said, her tone apologetic, before she looked more thoughtfully at them. "Look, Lisa was a good kid, but she used to scope the place for rich guys."

"So she was a prostitute," Bones said.

"What?" Denise said, looking at the anthropologist in shock. "No, no. She was just like any of us."

"Looking for a husband, right?" Booth asked in understanding.

"This guy last night," Denise continued after a brief pause. "she zoned in on him real hard. Took him upstairs, you know, for privacy."

"Upstairs where?" Booth asked.

"The room that was being renovated," Denise clarified. "The one that caught on fire. I mean, it's against the rules, but we've all done it."

"Right," Booth said, chuckling slightly at the memory; no matter where he went, there was always _one_ rule of the workplace that people were willing to break so long as they timed it properly…

"I mean, why else work in a high-class place like this, right?" Denise said with a slightly flirtatious smile.

"Yeah," Booth said, reminded of some of his old cases in Los Angeles; sometimes, even if it was crap, people would take any job so long as they could find the right perks (He recalled one time he'd spent a few months delivering pizzas in the early seventies as Angel, appreciating the fact that it allowed him to work nights and be on his own).

"Someone's trying to flag you down," Bones said, prompting Denise to turn as the bartender called her name again, apologising briefly to them before she walked away to return to work.

"Looks like it's possible that Lisa went upstairs for a little quickie and, uh, wandered into a nightmare," Booth said, looking over at Bones as he rapped thoughtfully on the table.

"She was trying to get you to go upstairs for a little…" Bones replied, knocking on the table and whistling; Booth was only saved from replying when Denise came back to their table

"Hey," she said, indicating a guy walking across the bar behind them, "that's the guy that Lisa was with."

Following the indicated direction, Booth noticed a young man walking across towards the bar, wearing dark trousers and a vertically striped shirt with dark hair and Hispanic features.

"Yeah, he looks like he can be six feet tall," Bones said.

"What do you say we go pay him a little visit?" Booth suggested, the two walking over to the bar where the guy was now sitting before he could have a chance to move.

"Mind if we ask you a few questions?" Bones asked, leaning against the bar alongside their new suspect.

"Oh, well," the man said, grinning back at her, "lose your friend, and maybe."

"It's about Lisa Winnaker," Bones clarified.

With that statement, the man slowly turned around in his seat before he practically leapt off it and began to run. Booth tackled him to the ground with relative ease, only for his temporary elation to be cut short when he heard the sound of a gun being cocked behind him; evidently, whoever this guy was, he'd brought a friend.

"OK," he said, quickly halting his attack on the downed man- dealing with the armed enemy was always the more sensible call- as he slowly got to his feet, the gun up against his neck as the suspect began to crawl away. "It's cool, man, it's all good…"

With the armed man lulled into a temporary sense of security, Booth spun around to grab the arm with the gun and knock it aside, forcing the guard back as he took the gun from his hand before pulling out his own weapon and handing it to Bones, their suspect once again on the ground after his partner had halted his attempts to get back up.

"My name is Antonio Ramos!" the man they'd initially confronted said, looking at them with an anxious edge to his voice. "Call the Colombian embassy; I have diplomatic immunity!"

Looking at the man they'd just knocked down, the faint trace of a smirk on his face at that statement, Booth groaned at this latest turn of events.

They finally get a lead, and they were going to be unable to follow it up due to the damn mess of diplomatic immunity (Booth had no reason to doubt that story; anyone who just wanted to buy time to get away would make up a far trickier story to confirm or deny than diplomatic immunity)?

He _really_ missed the days when he dealt with monsters that wouldn't have known the meaning of that kind of crap (If it hadn't been so terrifying, the idea of some of Wolfram & Hart's clients trying to get away from him by claiming diplomatic immunity would have been rather amusing; he somehow doubted that extended to the kind of demons he'd run into back then)…

* * *

  
"A woman like Judge Ramos, who stood up to the drug cartels, who always did the right thing… it's hard to imagine her killing another human being," Bones said, looking thoughtfully at him as they sat at their usual table in the diner, turning over the recent evidence in their minds as they ate their food.

"Bones, she's a strong woman; that's why she stood up to the cartels, and lived on after her daughter was killed," Booth said, once again uncomfortably reminded of Bones's previous statement about good people being incapable of murder. "Hey, look, her point of view… Lisa Winnaker was threatening her family, so she snapped."

"Will she get away with it?" Bones asked.

"Yeah," Booth said, nodding as he sipped at his coffee. "I think she will."

"OK," Cam said, walking up to them placing a file on the table before she sat down alongside Bones, looking between them with a direct manner. "We all got together- well, Zack wouldn't help until I threatened him-, but the rest of us…"

By way of explanation, she opened the file she had brought with her, showing various contents including a photograph of Antonio in an elevator.

"The blowback patterns shows that Lisa Winnaker's killer was six feet tall," Cam explained. Antonio Ramos is six feet tall. Lisa Winnaker had sex immediately before her demise, DNA tests show it was with Antonio Ramos. Lisa Winnaker was strangled with a silk ligature, Antonio Ramos favours silk ties."

"Why are you manipulating the facts to make it sound like Antonio was the killer?" Bones interjected, looking at Cam in confusion.

"No, it's OK, Bones," Booth said, looking solemnly at Cam. "Let her- let her continue."

He had a few ideas about where she was going with this, but he'd prefer to hear it from Cam before he made any snap judgements; he'd learned the value of not doing those the hard way…

"Because of his broken arm, Antonio Ramos was forced to place his foot on Lisa Winnaker's back, damaging her vertebrae," Cam continued, indicating an X-ray.

"You are fabricating a scenario by misrepresenting the evidence and omitting key facts," Bones objected.

"It's a bluff," Cam said. "Cops do it all the time."

"So you think if we frame Antonio, Judge Ramos will confess to save her own son," Booth said, looking thoughtfully at Cam.

"What mother wouldn't?" Cam asked.

Booth had to admit, it certainly fit most of the mothers in his experience; even Darla had died to save her son in the end…

"Bones?" he asked, looking over at his partner.

"No," Bones said firmly. "No."

"It's no different than lying to a criminal to get a confession," Cam said.

"Or having Hodgins call the FAA with a fake terrorism tip," Booth noted, smiling slightly at Bones.

"He did what?" Cam asked, looking sharply at Booth.

"Oh, what?" Booth said, looking back at Cam. "Now, suddenly, there's a line here?"

"You can't allow this," Bones said, looking indignantly at him.

"I'm a hundred percent against it," Booth said; his mind had been made up when Cam started speaking- he'd made too many moral compromises as Angel, and didn't want to make any more unless he was certain it was required-, but he'd wanted to give her a chance to state her case before he dismissed it completely.

"Seeley, you hate diplomatic immunity," Cam said, looking incredulously at him.

"Well," Booth said- another difference between his life as Booth and his life as Angel; he'd had to bend the rules when he was running Wolfram & Hart, but these days he had to acknowledge and appreciate some of the rules on the larger scale even if he found them inconvenient personally-, "I'm against it when it's interfering with my murder investigation, but the world's bigger than that."

"What are you talking about?" Bones asked.

"We cheat diplomatic immunity here in DC, we catch a murderer, that's great," Booth said (Potential political backlash; another thing he had to worry about more as Booth than he ever had as Angel, particularly since he didn't have Gunn to help him apologise for some of the faux pas that could have ruined everything when he'd slipped up during his time at Wolfram & Hart). "They do it in 'Upper Kamikazestan' and our boys end up on a red-hot spit over a slow fire."

"There's no such place as 'Kamikazestan'," Bones pointed out.

"OK," Booth said- he'd try and spare the time to give Bones a refresher course in sarcasm later-, "bottom line is, we ignore diplomatic immunity and the rest of the world finds out, it's open season on Americans. So you know what?" he said, reaching over to pick up the file Cam had brought, "thanks for the effort and the fake file," he continued speaking as he tore it in half, "but let's just remember, all right?"

He tossed the torn file into a passing bin and looked firmly at Cam. "We're the good guys. Oh, I'm gonna need that real evidence file too."

"OK," Cam said, getting up and leaving the diner, leaving Booth to look at Bones.

He'd need to remember to talk with her about this particular turn of events when things were over; judging by that stare, she was _not_ happy with what Cam had suggested they do…

* * *

  
Looking at Bones as she leant against the railing on the Jeffersonian's upper lounge, Booth wished that this whole case could have been resolved in a smoother manner than it had been; this mess with Cam contemplating faking evidence hadn't exactly helped the still-tentative relationship Bones was developing with her new boss.

"Well," Booth said, walking over to stand beside her as he looked at their team, examining their latest body on the main table of the lab, "look at 'em down there, huh? Heh! Probably falsifying evidence."

"I'm not sure I can totally trust Doctor Saroyan after that," Bones said, her expression the neutral one she always assumed when she didn't know how to process what she was feeling.

"You know, Bones," Booth said, feeling obligated to voice Cam's perspective in her absence, "Cam's a cop at heart. She, uh… she just wants to catch the bad guys. There are a lot of grey areas."

"Not for you," Bones said, with the straightforward simplicity that reminded Booth why he liked being Booth; he might still need to find the occasional compromise, but at least he could avoid those grey areas of letting certain criminals go free so that he could continue to deal with others. "You did the right thing."

"Yeah, it worked out, is all," Booth said, trying not to smile at the compliment; something about Bones's simple perspective on his actions really made him feel better about himself.

"You did the right thing," Bones repeated, looking solemnly at him.

Booth could only smile in response to that simple statement, with the smile becoming slightly broader when he turned around to see two men in suits approaching the lab platform.

"Uh, oh," Booth said, as the men walked towards Hodgins, one showing the entomologist his badge; evidently the fake terrorism 'tip' was being followed up on.

"Shouldn't we do something?" Bones asked.

"Are you kidding?" Booth said, allowing himself a grin as the men took Hodgins by the arms, the entomologist looking up at them with a slight smile on his face as he was led away by the new arrivals. "Hodgins being abducted by men in black? That's a dream come true."

It might be a weird fantasy for any man to have, but considering some of the things Booth had fantasised about when he was Angelus, he wasn't exactly going to criticise Hodgins for something this minor; at least Hodgins' dreams didn't hurt anyone else.

They'd solved the case, caught the killer, and managed to deal with the frustrations of diplomatic immunity; all in all, it hadn't been a bad day.


	30. The Girl with the Curl

"OK," Angela said, entering variables into the computer based on their analysis of their latest victim as the rest of the team stood around her, "this is the colour she would've had from the bleaching."

"I think the alkaloids would make the colour brighter," Hodgins said, leaning over to examine the image on the screen more closely, the hair colour in the image shifting as Angela made the appropriate modifications to her program.

"OK, so some twisted psycho killer gives this little girl a makeover before he kills her?" Booth asked, only for his glance at the rest of the team to confirm his darkest thoughts; someone had made this little girl go through all this _before_ she'd been targeted by her killer.

"I hate working with kids," Angela said, beating anyone else to whatever response they might have made to Booth's comment. "Childhood should be all about swings."

It was a simple sentence, but it brought back so many memories for Booth.

It wasn't like he was one of those old-fashioned parents who thought that the old ways were best- he might have seen the way things had been when children had to rely on themselves for their entertainment, but he wasn't going to deny the benefits of technology as well-, but he still appreciated the simple moment in life, and distant memories of taking Kathy out on horse-rides when they'd had days to spare, sitting in a meadow sketching while she made daisy-chains…

"Swings?" Zack asked, even as Hodgins looked contemplative as he considered Angela's comment.

"Yeah," Angela said, her tone simple and direct. "You know, how high can I go? If I twist the chains, how fast will I spin?"

"What if I try to jump off before the swing stops?" Hodgins asked, smiling at Angela with a warm tone to his voice that Booth rarely heard from the entomologist.

"Exactly," Angela said, grinning back at him.

"I miss that feeling," Hodgins said wistfully.

"Yeah, me too," Angela confirmed, Booth smiling thoughtfully at the memories evoked by their comments of days when he'd had far less to worry about…

"I miss organic chemistry class," Bones said, a fond smile on her face even as the work-related nature of her statement partially undermined the earlier discussion. "Those were good times."

"I miss my first microscope," Zack put in, a serious tone to his voice.

"Great, yeah, and I miss normal people," Booth said, shaking his head and raising his eyebrows; he appreciated their effort to contribute, but they seemed to be missing the point about what Angela had been trying to say. "Can we go on?"

"Factor in the teeth," Bones said, Angela enlarging the relevant area of the portrait as the teeth displayed were elonogated and brightened accordingly.

"Yeah, you know," Booth said, unable to restrain a grimace at the sight; he was slightly reminded of how his own teeth had shifted whenever he went 'vamp face'. "Cause, uh, this isn't weird enough…"

"Hodgins supplied the types of make-up," Angela commented, adding the relevant colour to the girl's face, including lipstick and eye-shadow, before changing the hairstyle to an upright perm of some sort that was more dramatic than anything Booth had seen on a child before. "And that's what we've got."

"She looks thirty," Booth said, sceptically studying the image before him; he'd heard of some killers making their victims dress up as part of their 'games', but he still didn't get it.

"OK," Bones said, "run the image against the database now."

As Angela clicked a few buttons, the on-screen image was rapidly compared to a series of scans of childrens' pictures, until it came to a stop on a picture of a girl dressed in pink with an even more outlandish hair-style than the one on the computer.

"Oh my God," Cam said. "That's Brianna Swanson."

"Who?" Bones asked.

"Little beauty queen who disappeared a few months ago," Booth quietly informed his partner; he'd noted the story at the time for the tragedy of it, but hadn't wanted to pay particularly close attention.

"In the middle of a Little Miss Junior Patriot Pageant," Angela clarified.

"Just nine years old…" Bones said, half to herself, as she studied the picture, Booth unable to do anything other than stare at it with her.

He hadn't even looked over the files yet, and he already knew that this case was going to be _very_ difficult to deal with…

* * *

  
"You have a roofing business?" Booth asked, looking curiously at Brianna's father, Dave Swanson, as he leaned against the wall of the interrogation room, Bones sitting silently at the table while Booth sat on its edge.

"Uh, yeah," Swanson replied, running his hand awkwardly over his bald forehead. "I-I-I went out on my own when Brianna was born; thought I could make some more money, you know?"

"Do you use mastic asphalt in your work?" Bones asked, looking at him with her usual neutral expression.

"Uh, yeah, for waterproofing," Swanson replied. "Why?"

"Were you working the day your daughter disappeared?" Booth asked casually; fathers were always an awkward subject for him, given most of the crap examples he'd seen when he was Angel, even if he was personally committed to being better than they had ever been, and the information Brianna's mother had provided for them didn't help him tackle this situation with the objectivity it deserved.

"No, it was the weekend," Swanson replied, a growing edge of irritation to his voice. "What are you guys getting at?"

"We're just trying to piece things together," Booth said, trying to placate the other man. "That's all-"

"Damn it!" Swanson yelled, his fingers pressing against the table as he glared at Booth and Bones. "I answered all these questions when Brianna first went missing. This is Jackie's doing, right?"

"You wanted your daughter back," Booth replied, keeping his voice level. "Sometimes, in a divorce, the emotions… they get a little high, you don't know what you're doing …"

"No, I know _exactly_ what happened," Swanson said firmly. "Jackie wasted so much time having the cops check me out, the case went cold. This is all Jackie's fault."

Under other circumstances, Booth would have argued against Swanson apparently attempting to pass the blame on to his ex-wife, but he'd seen enough grief and rage over the centuries to know when it was and wasn't misdirected, and this was an example of when it wasn't.

"Look," Swanson said, sitting down and pulling out his wallet, opening it to show a picture of a younger, more natural-looking, brown-haired Brianna sitting behind her father, her hands on his shoulders, the picture of childhood innocence. "This was my little girl. Not what Jackie turned her into. _This_ is who I wanted back."

There was nothing that could be said to that, so Booth and Bones simply sat in silence until Swanson looked back up at them. "You, uh… you didn't give her the remains, did you?"

"No," Bones replied, sympathy in her eyes as she looked at him. "We can't release them. Not before the investigation is completed."

"I want her buried right," Swanson said, looking at her photograph with grief practically written all over his face.

Booth could understand that sentiment only too well; he'd certainly gone to what lengths he could to make Cordelia's funeral as tasteful as possible, giving her what she would have wanted rather than the lavish ceremony he could have afforded on his new budget.

"I don't want her funeral to be some disgusting show Jackie puts on," Swanson continued, his voice trembling slightly as he discussed a pain no parent should ever have to endure. "I-I-I… I wanna bury her with some love, you know?"

It might leave them stuck for suspects once again, but something about the genuine grief that this man showed for his daughter told Booth that this guy cared far more for Brianna than the mother she'd ended up staying with.

* * *

  
"This is the rib cage of a healthy ten-year-old girl," Zack explained, indicating an X-Ray of a ribcage on a monitor, Booth looking on with Cam and Bones as they stood on one of the side lab rooms.

"And this," Bones continued, the image switching to reveal a second, more compact rib cage shaped more like an hourglass alongside the first image, "is our victim's rib cage."

"Ouch," Booth said, wincing at the image; he didn't know much about bone growth, but something like that could _not_ be good for the internal organs it was meant to protect.

"This," Bones continued, bringing up another image of a ribcage with a severely warped spine, "is an X-Ray of a teenage girl who died in 1872."

"What caused the deformity?" Cam asked. "Was it genetic?"

"It was a corset… tightened a little more each day," Bones said

Booth couldn't help but wince at that image; he might have had limited experience of corsets since he'd left Darla and Drusilla after regaining his soul- he hadn't spent enough time with women after that to have much reason to be bothered about corsets, and by the time he was past the worst of his issues they weren't really fashionable any more-, but he knew how tight they could be from some of the trouble Angelus had encountered getting them off.

The thought of someone deliberately doing that to a _kid_ …

"That's torture", he said simply, his mind briefly registering Bones's speculation that Brianna had slept like that.

"I imagine it was to give her an hourglass figure, which wouldn't be possible naturally until well into puberty," Bones said.

"You gotta be- you're telling me her _mom_ did this to her?" Booth said, his opinion of this case just becoming even bleaker with that revelation.

He never thought he'd say this about anyone, but this woman was almost a more twisted parent than Holtz; Holtz's attitude towards raising Connor in Quor-toth might have been harsh, but at least he'd been willing to give Connor some kind of normality outside of training, whereas Brianna's mother seemed to consider any time her daughter spent not perfecting her appearance to be a waste of time.

"People have done much worse for beauty," Bones said. "Neck stretching, foot binding-"

"OK, and you're saying that makes it OK?" Booth asked, looking at his partner sceptically.

"Well, of course not," Bones said, quickly dispelling Booth's initial concerns. "Any major alteration of our underlying architecture demeans us. You know, we all have aspects of ourselves we might wish were different."

"Yes," Zack said with an emphatic nod. "I wanted larger biceps before I became comfortable with my mental acuity."

Booth definitely wasn't going near that one; Zack might be relatively comfortable with who he was, but he still had a long way to go if anyone else was going to be comfortable with it…

"Here," Bones continued, zooming the X-ray in on what Booth assumed was a particular section of bone- at that close proximity, it put him in mind of caves in a cliff-, "you can see… cribra orbitalia, suggesting Brianna suffered from long-term malnourishment."

"There's no enamel erosion to indicate bulimia, so it's more likely she's been on a calorie-controlled diet for at least two years," Zack added (Booth didn't know what the long-term implications of such a diet would be, but he'd understood enough to know that it probably wouldn't be pleasant).

"Oh, it gets better," Cam said.

"How can it not?" Booth asked sardonically.

"Her tox screen came back with traces of somatropin, tetracycline, and glycopyrronium bromide," Cam said.

Booth had no idea what that meant, but judging by Bones's look of shock, it couldn't be good.

"Human growth hormone, broad-spectrum antibiotic used to treat acne, and a chemical mixture that controls perspiration," Zack explained (Booth would have been proud of Zack's ability to 'dumb things down' without making him feel stupid if he wasn't horrified at what he'd just learned). "All with serious side effects."

"No prescriptions were ever issued," Cam added, confirming Booth's worst impressions.

"So Mom bound, starved and drugged her," Booth said grimly. "That's heartwarming."

"Our society puts a premium on beauty," Bones said. "Common in declining cultures."

Booth didn't like to think too much about the implications of that last statement, to the point that he was almost grateful when Angela arrived to report other news; he _really_ didn't want to consider what that statement about their society overall any more than he had to…

* * *

  
"This is what happened when Rome fell," Bones said reflectively, as the two of the sat around the table in the Jeffersonian's lounge area, the anthropologist cutting into a doughnut on the plate in front of her.

"What?" Booth asked, picking up one of the doughnuts with his finger and staring at it as he spoke. "People ate stale doughnuts?"

"Objectification of women, beauty as self-esteem," Bones said, clarifying that she was addressing the case rather than their immediate activities.

"Well," Booth said, smiling slightly at her- the result might have sucked, but he still wanted to stay somewhat optimistic- as he put his doughnut down, "I think, you know, some of those kids actually had a good time."

If he'd learned anything from Cordelia's brief acting aspirations, it was the importance of performers enjoying themselves when they were on stage; the motivations that led to them being entered might have been questionable, but he'd been around people enough to know that the girls had enjoyed themselves.

"The girl in the pink could really dance," Bones said, nodding contemplatively as she ate her snack before her tone became grimmer. "But then again, Nero could really play the fiddle."

"You know, Bones," Booth said, his expression thoughtful as he looked at her

"I like to think that, um, someplace deep inside, people really know what's important."

He knew that Buffy and Cordelia had needed some very drastic experiences to reach that point themselves, but the fact remained that, when they'd had a chance to at least try and get away after witnessing what life was really like, they'd resolved to remain and continue the fight, no matter what the final costs had been.

"It's hard to believe when you see women trying to disguise or change themselves," Bones said.

Booth just mumbled a response, out of a lack of anything else to say; most of his examples of women changing or disguising themselves were more positive than the examples Bones was probably expecting,

"I never understood that," Bones said, popping another piece of doughnut in her mouth.

"Well, I mean, no, of course you wouldn't," Booth said, smiling at her before he realised what he'd said.

"Why?" Bones asked, looking curiously at him.

"Well, it's just, you know…" Booth said, initially trying not to look at her before he decided to bite the proverbial bullet and finish what he'd been saying, "someone who looks like you… well, wouldn't…"

He paused for a moment, looking her in the eyes, as he finally finished his sentence. "Just because of the way you look."

"I don't understand," Bones said, shaking her head as she looked at him in confusion. "What… way do I look?"

"Well, you know," Booth said, smiling at her slightly baffled expression, "you're… structured… very well."

Looking down at herself, Bones looked contemplative for a moment before looking back at him with a slight smile.

"As are you," she said.

For a moment, Booth allowed himself to enjoy the moment, before he glanced down at the lower level and found himself looking at Cam as she stared up at him,

Somehow, that one glance made this current conversation feel so much more… awkward…

On the one hand, he should probably go down there and join Cam, but on the other hand, he and Bones had _really_ been having an interesting conversation…


	31. The Woman in the Sand

Walking through the casino, Booth wished that he could relax more; he wasn't sure if it was just because of what had nearly happened to him during his last visit to Las Vegas as Angel, his memories of Booth's gambling addiction, or a combination of both- he sometimes wondered if whatever had created Booth's past had added in that particular 'quirk' to give him a reason to avoid casinos-, but he always felt on edge when he was in these environments, and the fact that they were hunting a murderer didn't do much to improve his mood.

"Hey," Bones said, indicating a man in a dark suit and unbuttoned shirt walking between the tables a short distance away. "There's our loan shark; let's go!"

"OK," Booth said, staying in pace even as Bones moved forwards. "Just, uh… give me a moment."

It was so rare that he had to deal with these kind of situations that so reinforced the difference between what Booth and Angel were aware of; Angel could have sensed all kinds of details about these people based on his awareness of the most minor signals given out by their bodies, but Booth was limited to a human level of senses and the relevant responses…

"Oh my God!" Bones said, turning back to look at him with a shocked expression of apology, "I completely forgot! You can't be here, Booth; you're a degenerate gambler!"

"Former gambler, OK?" Booth said, looking pointedly at her. "Not degenerate; I've been through the program, OK… and you know what; he's on the move," he said, indicating where their target had started walking again.

"OK, but what if you got a sudden urge to gamble while you're here?" Bones asked as they continued to walk after their target, holding on to his arm in a protectively reassuring manner. "I mean, it's like sending an alcoholic to a distillery. Do you need to sit down?"

"No, I'm fine," Booth said (He was _not_ going to snap at his partner for her somewhat-comical exaggeration of the worst-case-scenarios he might be dealing with; he would appreciate her concern and not snap at her that he could resist the urge to gamble after resisting the urge to treat people like food…). "It's just, you know the sound of the winning. It'll...it'll pass."

"What?" Bones asked. "The sound or the winning?"

"This kind of reminds me of the first time," Booth said, quickly going over his memories of Vegas's development over the years; make the right adjustments to the story to fit someone who came to Vegas as a young man a couple of decades ago rather than a centuries-old vampire who came to its opening days, and there wasn't that much difference between Angel's true first time here and Booth's fake story. "I walked in the Desert Inn with thirty-five bucks in my pocket and I walked out with a cool ten grand. The next night, I lost everything. Tapped out my ATM trying to get it back."

"What's that game called again?" Bones asked, indicating a nearby table.

"Craps," Booth replied.

"What?" Bones asked, holding out a hand to stop him. "What's the matter now?"

"No, it's the game; it's called Craps," Booth clarified, looking at the table reflectively; with his vampiric coordination, rolling the dice the right way had been relatively easy. "You know, hey, this used to be my game, Bones. Roll them bones, chuck the dice, you know…"

Looking at the table, he was momentarily disappointed to see the dealer taking in the chips, but then noted their suspect once again. "And he's going for the bar. OK, you stay here; I know how to talk to these guys."

"Whoa, talk?" Bones said, looking at him in surprise at the new order. "You can barely breathe."

"I'm fine, just trust me, alright?" Booth said, looking pointedly at her. "Wait here."

"And do what, exactly?" Bones asked with a slight edge to her voice.

"You're an anthropologist," Booth retorted. "Observe the culture."

Bones might be out of her depth in social situations, but he had a feeling that she'd do well if he gave her that kind of order/suggestion…

* * *

  
"Take a closer look at the stress markers to her sternum, Zack," Bones said, the car's video phone on as they spoke with the rest of the team back at the lab. "They strike you as unusual?"

" _Well, they do seem more the result of repetitive medium impact manual blows than the single high impact from a bat_ ," Zack replied.

" _The husband could really dish it out_ ," Hodgins said grimly.

" _Maybe she dished it back_ ," Zack suddenly said. " _These hairline fractures on her knuckles_?"

"Defensive wounds," Bones said, her tone contemplative. "Wait a minute; let me zoom in?"

With that instruction, the screen quickly adjusted to focus on the relevant area, Bones studying it for a moment before speaking again. "Repetitive manual blows, fractured knuckles… The glucocorticoid that killed your bugs, Hodgins; could it have been simple cortisone to treat an injury?"

" _Yeah_ ," Hodgins said. " _Certainly possible_ …"

" _What are you thinking, Doctor Brennan_?" Cam asked.

"I am thinking Billie Morgan could have been a boxer," Bones.

"You mean like a real boxer?" Booth said, looking at her in surprise. "In the ring?"

" _But wouldn't boxing gloves prevent injuries like these_?" Cam asked.

" _Unless she wasn't wearing gloves_ ," Hodgins pointed out.

" _Well, what boxer does that_?" Angela asked.

" _Ultimate fighters_ ," Hodgins said, answering the question before Booth could voice his own theory.

"Ultimate fighters," Booth said, allowing himself an exaggerated smile. "Ah, you're into that crap too, huh, Hodgins?"

" _Dude, it's barbaric_ ," Hodgins said with a grin. " _When it shows up on cable I can't turn it off_."

" _And it's actually legal_?" Angela asked.

" _Completely sanctioned_ ," Hodgins said. " _They do wear some protective gear, which would fly in the face of our girl's injuries, though_."

"That is," Booth pointed out, "unless it was underground."

"Underground where?" Bones asked.

"Come on," Booth said. "Haven't you guys ever seen _Fight Club_?"

" _Illegal, no holds barred, slug fests_ ," Hodgins said with a relish to his tone that Booth didn't like when violence was the subject. " _Modern day Panem et Circensus. But generally there's no free bread_."

"So Don Morgan didn't beat his wife," Bones said.

"Got to say," Booth said, trying to keep the smug tone down to a minimum, "I told you so."

It might give them more possibilities to eliminate, but at least they had a better idea where to look for their killer now.

* * *

  
He might not do this kind of thing regularly, but, in a strange way, Booth found it significantly easier to go undercover since he had become human again; not only was there the advantage that he was less likely to expose his true identity now that sunlight wasn't a weakness, but somehow, when most of his current life felt like a lie, it was strangely reassuring to be in a situation where those who really knew him _expected_ him to be lying.

Admittedly, the outfit felt a bit strange as he put it on- the suspenders in particular were something he'd always found a bit fiddly when they'd been developed; belts made it a lot easier-, but at least it wasn't as tasteless as that Hawaiian shirt he'd worn when helping Kate catch that mobster, and it served the purpose of creating an identity that wasn't him for the current mission.

"Hey," Bones said, emerging from the bathroom in a black dress with wide drooping arms that practically enveloped her figure. "What do you think?"

"I have enough Bibles, thank you, but try next door," Booth replied, his thoughts on his partner's social skills lowering again; in the kind of environment they were trying to infiltrate, that kind of attire wouldn't get them anywhere.

"You said I could be a school teacher," Bones pointed out, hands on her hips as she looked indignantly at him.

"Not the spinster kind who lives with her sister but, ya know, the hot one who makes the boys crazy," Booth said, handing her a dress he'd picked up from a shop when purchasing their attire for the current mission; he'd spent enough time with women over the years to have a good eye for estimating sizes. "Here, put on the one that I picked out, alright?"

"OK, but don't be so bossy," Bones said, as she took the dress and walked back to the bathroom.

"We're newlyweds, I said," Booth said, checking over his attire in the mirror while working out the right posture for his new persona. "Takin' Sin City by storm, ready for action."

"But you know," Bones said, still changing in the bathroom, "marriage is such an archaic institution-"

"Listen, Bones," Booth said, exhaling in frustration as he pulled on a short-sleeved shirt, "I know what I'm doing, OK? I've done this before; just stop arguing."

"I'm not," Bones replied. "It's just, you know, I don't need a piece of paper to prove my commitment."

"Fine," Booth said, adding a dark jacket to his attire. "We're engaged."

"Why would I be okay with engagement?" Bones asked.

"Whatever, Bones, all right?" Booth said, rolling his eyes in frustration at his partner's stubbornness as he tested out a hat to observe its effect on his new appearance. "We're a loosely committed couple of hot high rollers, see, with money to burn, 'cause that is what's gonna get us in the door."

Turning around at the sound of the door opening, Booth's eyes widened at the sight that greeted him as Bones emerged from the bathroom.

He'd always known that his partner was a beautiful woman, but seeing her in such a tight, dark dress, revealing so much more than he was used to seeing while still remaining tasteful…

"Like this?" Bones asked, indicating the dress.

"Yeah," Booth said, as his brain caught up with the rest of him. "Yeah, like that."

Even the phone call Bones subsequently received from the Jeffersonian staff wasn't enough to get Booth's mind off the image of his partner in that dress, to say nothing of how she turned around and basically asked him to zip her up; that was an image that he was _not_ going to forget any time soon…

* * *

  
Walking into the underground fight club, Booth tried not to show his discomfort at their current environment; Seeley Booth would just be unnerved by the whole thing, but Angel had experienced some moments in this kind of environment that it was hard to forget.

Even after so many years had passed, his time in that demonic fight-ring still frustrated him; not only did he have so little evidence that the thing had been shut down for good after he finished off the current wave of fights, but he could never be sure if what he'd done had actually been for the best, considering how violent some of those demons had been…

"I suppose," Bones said as they walked through the crowd of people watching the fight, "from an anthropological standpoint, this taps into the nihilistic part of the human psyche fascinated by blood and gore…"

"It's human cock-fighting," Booth said. He might tolerate his partner's eccentricity at times- and it wasn't likely that anyone could hear them over the roar of the current fight anyway-, but this particular situation evoked far too many personal memories for him to feel comfortable with her discussing nihilism and blood; it put him even more in mind of his time as a vampire…

"More like lesser surrogates engaged in battles on behalf of the elite lords who don't have the courage to fight themselves," Bones said.

"Alright, you know what?" Booth said, lowering his voice as he looked at his partner- the fight would only distract other people for so long if she kept talking like that- before snapping his fingers. "Come back to me, Roxie, huh?"

"Ewww, look at all that sweat!" Bones said, slipping into character as a powerful kick from one combatant knocked his opponent to the ground. As the announcer- Booth couldn't call him a referee as that implied there were rules for him to enforce- identified the winner, Booth's attention shifted to the man who'd just been defeated.

He _knew_ that guy…

"What in the hell are you looking at?" the man- Walt, Booth was fairly sure his name was; he'd been in the academy when Booth would have been there- said, walking over to look at Booth with a cold glare.

"Not much," Booth replied, before a punch to the face knocked him to the ground, the familiar feeling of unconsciousness seeping over him before Booth even had the time to reflect on his frustration at his greater vulnerability now that he was human…

* * *

  
With the case resolved and Bones packing away their luggage- he wasn't falling into gender roles, but after the beating he'd taken last night he just wanted a chance to sit down-, Booth took advantage of the peace to watch the news report on the recent arrests; it might be egocentric, but it was nice to feel like he was performing a service that would receive some public acknowledgement, even if his name wasn't attached to the case directly.

"'Among others'?" Bones said, looking indignantly at the television as the reporter only identified Mason Roberts by name as one of the Arnos' victims. "Is that what Billie Morgan is to these people? Others?"

"It's day one, Bones, relax," Booth said, even as his partner picked up the remote and turned the television off. "You know what? Billie's going to have her story told; it's just a matter of time."

With that said, he decided that now was as good a time as any to ask the question that he'd been waiting to ask since she made the original comment. "So what was the, uh, second reason?"

"What?" Bones asked, not looking at him despite the confusion in her tone.

"You never told me the second reason why, uh, why you bet on me," Booth clarified, walking over to stand beside her.

"Yeah," Bones said, blushing slightly as she continued packing. "It was… silly."

"Well, come on," Booth replied. "Try me."

"Beginner's luck," Bones said at last. "I haven't lost at anything since I've been here. So, well, I… I figured if I bet on you, then…"

"I couldn't lose," Booth said, smiling in understanding at her.

"Sounds silly, right?" Bones asked.

"It sounds familiar," Booth said, smiling warmly at her. "Thanks."

"You're welcome," Bones replied.

Booth wasn't sure what prompted the stare that followed, but he was relieved when Bones broke it by reminding them of their need to leave; things were complicated enough without thinking too much about _that_ …


	32. Aliens in a Spaceship

"Has it occurred to you that God is a lot like the Grave Digger?" Bones asked, looking curiously over at Booth as they drove away from their latest interview.

"What?" Booth asked, removing his sunglasses as he looked at his partner in confusion; he'd had enough to think about after adjusting his thoughts to ignore his earlier concerns that they'd found some left-over Initiative experiment when they'd discovered that pod, and now Bones was bringing up something like _that_?

"He lays down the rules, no way to question him or negotiate, then it's almost as though he doesn't care how it works out," Bones explained. "Either you do as he says, make some sacrifices and they're delivered, or you don't and you end up in hell."

"You know what?" Booth retorted, falling back on the most religious thing he could think of to say right now and hoping Cordelia or whoever else was up there wouldn't mind it, "I'd appreciate it if you didn't say things like that because I really don't want to get struck by lightning."

"Do you go to church every Sunday?" Bones asked, as he took advantage of the current straight stretch of road to cross himself (If nothing else, that kind of gesture helped him reaffirm his humanity).

"Yes, I do," Booth replied (He might be undecided about God specifically, but given his awareness of some higher powers up there, attending church was the easiest way to accommodate Booth's religious background while showing respect for whatever powers had given him his humanity).

"Can I come with you?" Bones asked.

"No," Booth said. "You can't."

"Why?" Bones asked. "It might help me to understand."

"I am not going to help you disrespect God in His own house, OK?" Booth retorted; he'd encountered enough religious ceremonies over the years to know that you couldn't really understand something by attending a ceremony. "If you want to do some kind of, ya know, anthropological study… turn on the religious channel."

Organised religion might not be as important to him as he sometimes acted like it was, but he was conflicted enough about his faith in higher powers as it was without having someone there with him.

He _wanted_ to believe that there was something better out there, but when most of the higher powers he'd met either sat back and did nothing to help or stepped in to enforce their own vision of what should be- his Shanshu had been a blessing, but he still attributed that more to people putting in a good word rather than anything else-, he was more comfortable with the ideals of Christianity rather than the specifics…

* * *

  
As he listened to the recording of the Grave Digger's voice, informing them of the account number needed for the wire transfer that would save Hodgins and Bones's lives, Booth couldn't recall the last time he'd wanted to _really_ get his hands on someone this badly.

He'd wanted to kill people before, of course- with what he'd done in the past and what he did for a living now, it was inevitable that he'd encounter people he just wanted to kill because there was no conceivable set of circumstances where letting them live would be a good idea-, but he rarely wanted to torture someone as much as he did this guy; the bastard Gravedigger had created a scenario where people had to give up so much of what they'd earned through actual positive effort while putting people through one of the worst kinds of death he could think of…

"It will be his last communication too," Thomas Vega said, as the message concluded. "He's never varied."

"He learned from the Kent boys," Kim Kurland noted. "He's got two of them, he cut the deadline in half."

Booth hadn't needed to know that; this guy was dangerous enough with his warped M.O., but the idea that he was able to adapt it for the sake of it…

"Why is The Grave Digger demanding so much money?" Vega asked speculatively. "It doesn't make any sense."

"Well, he's always been reasonable at knowing how much people can raise within the time limit," Janine pointed out (Booth didn't like the implication of that statement; it sounded like the journalist was already considering the financial possibilities rather than thinking about the victims as _people_ ).

"Has, uh, has Doctor Brennan made that much money from her books?" Vega asked, his tone an assessing one that Booth didn't like.

"It's Hodgins," Booth corrected; he might have assured the bug and slime guy he'd keep quiet about his wealth, but this wasn't the kind of situation where secrets would help anybody. "He's the sole heir to this thing called the Cantilever Group."

"What's that?" Vega asked.

"Just the third largest privately owned corporation in the country…" Janine said grimly.

"Make sense now, Tom?" Booth asked, looking grimly over at the author.

The sooner he could get started on trying to crack this case, the better for everyone; he had to find his partner and the bug and dirt guy before it was too late, and he had less to work with than he'd had to use when trying to rescue Connor.

God, this was one occasion when he missed some of the supernatural artefacts he'd acquired over the years; it might have been risky, but he'd take the risk if it meant ensuring their survival…

* * *

  
"There's no negotiating with the Grave Digger," Vega said as he walked into Booth's office, the man's manner frustrating Booth with his sheer nonchalance; the man was here to advise on the case, and now he was telling Booth how to do his goddamn job…

"You've been through this… what, five times with this guy?" Booth said, turning around to look at the former agent.

"Exactly," Vega said. "So I know him, and he does not negotiate."

"Oh, what?" Booth said, deciding to voice the theory he'd been nurturing since this mess began. "What, no… chat room action with him?"

"Are you nuts?" Vega said, looking genuinely offended at the idea. "I hate the son of a bitch."

"Why?" Booth replied. "He's made you rich."

"You know what?" Vega said, his voice lowering as he walked towards Booth. "You just need to deal with the facts; that if you can't put the ransom together in the time he gave you, your partner is dead."

In that moment, Booth was suddenly reminded of the way the Scoobies had reacted to Wesley during that whole mess with the Box of Gavrok, when he'd suggested they sacrifice Willow; the advice he was hearing made sense, but he would be _damned_ if he was going to go along with it (The situation might be different, but the _sentiment_ still remained valid; _nobody_ got to tell them what to do if the alternative meant letting a friend die).

It might not be professional, but he wasn't going to be goddamn _professional_ when Bones's _life_ was on the line…

Acting on instinct, he grabbed Vega and threw him onto the table behind him, his throat about the other man's neck as he held him down.

"Here's the deal, all right?" he said, not even bothering to look at the other guy; if he gave the impression he didn't see the man below him as a person, it would help make his point more clearly. "You have a relationship with this guy, what they call symbiotic; you benefit from each other, hmm?

"So know this," he continued, shifting his gaze downward to ensure that the other man got the point. "That deadline comes around, and my partner is still underground, I will end you, you understand?"

It might be a more decisive threat than he was usually comfortable making, but with the lives of two of his team at stake, the usual rules didn't apply.

"Three hours to live," he said, picking Vega up off the desk and virtually throwing him towards the office door; if the man didn't get out of his sight soon, he was going to do something even more violent to the git than he already had, and that might just end up getting him charged with harassment. "Better hurry."

* * *

  
The disadvantage of working with geniuses, in Booth's opinion, was that this kind of genius had too much raw knowledge; they were so focused on gathering facts and figures that they had only a limited ability to make this kind of intuitive leap required in this situation.

"It's not a numerical alphabetical code or an equation," Zack said, still studying the text that Booth had received earlier; he might have inspired them to keep working despite the official expiration of the time available, but that apparently wasn't going to get them working any faster.

"It's not GPS coordinates or indications of topography," Angela continued, her expression more solemn despite her obvious emotional investment in the results.

"Great," Booth said, looking urgently at the artist and the student. "Then what is it?"

"Can I make a suggestion?" Cam put in. "See, this is exactly why I was sent here. You guys are brilliant, but you won't make intuitive leaps."

"You mean 'jump to conclusions'?" Zack asked.

"That's exactly what I mean," Cam confirmed. "This is a message from one of them to one of us. Specific. Focused. Who was it meant to get to?"

"Easy," Booth said, leaping to the most obvious conclusion. "Brennan's cell to mine, right? The message was for me. We have an understanding, we work together."

"We all work together," Angela pointed out. "She's my best friend, and Hodgins… Hodgins…"

"She's right," Cam interjected, stopping Angela having to explain something that was clearly very emotionally complicated. "We should assume the message is from Hodgins, not from Brennan."

"Why?" Booth asked, even as a possible explanation came to him.

"Because they're buried alive," Cam began, reminding Booth of the specifics that he should have considered earlier.

"And Hodgins is all about dirt," Angela continued.

"OK, great," Booth said, trying to cover up his earlier oversight. "The message is about dirt, but who is it to?"

"Angela," Zack suggested. "Hodgins is all about dirt and Angela."

"But it's numbers, Zack," Angela pointed out. "It's for you. Hodgins would have written me a line of poetry or something."

"Agent Booth," Vega said, as he and O'Connell walked up to the platform, Booth breaking off the current discussion as he walked over to the stairs to hear their news. "Janine used all her contacts to get me on all the local news shows. Now, I explained that we needed more time, I asked him to call; I'm sorry, but he's completely consistent."

"Six, seven, sixteen," Zack said, distracting Booth's attention away from this pointless information- why did the guy bother to come here to tell them nothing had changed?- as he focused on the text message. "Carbon, Nitrogen and Sulfur on the periodic table of elements. They are buried in coal rich soil."

"You've got to narrow it down, Zack," Booth said, even as Bones's assistant pulled up a map that presumably contained the information needed to use the data Hodgins had provided; even if that was the right area, it was too large for them to search manually…

"Keep going, Zack," Angela said encouragingly.

"Uh… mineral components of coal are all the same; it's the organic components that provide a unique fingerprint," Zack continued, as the map shifted to focus in on a more specific section of the map. "They are called mascerals. They fluoresce at different levels. A reflectance of 1.4 is quite rare; suggesting a high concentration of inertinite."

"Zack, tell me what that means," Booth asked, as an area of the map was highlighted with a blue outline.

"It means he knows where they are," Angela said.

"Zack…" Booth said, looking pointedly at his partner's student.

"I know where they are," Zack said, pinpointing a spot on the map with an orange dot.

If Zack hadn't been so socially awkward, Booth might have hugged him after he revealed that news.

* * *

  
"What did you ask for?" Bones asked, leaning over to question him as he sat back after finishing his prayer in the front pew of the church, the day after their near-miraculous rescue.

"That's between me and a certain Saint," Booth replied, trying not to think about how fortunate the timing had been for this mission; if his team had arrived just a few minutes later, or if Bones and Hodgins had set off that explosion a bit earlier…

"Although…" he said contemplatively, glad for an excuse not to think about their close call directly, "I did ask for a little help finding the Grave Digger.

"Good move," Bones said, before she sniffed the air slightly. "What's that smell?"

"The candles," Booth said, indicating the fires in question. "And I said thanks. You should try it some time."

"If I were going to pray, I would have done it just before we set off the explosion," Bones replied.

"And you didn't?" Booth asked, ignoring her ignorance of his true meaning; that was just the way his partner was…

"No," Bones said. "See, if there was a God- which there isn't-"

"Do you see where we are?" Booth said, urgently ssshing his partner; he wasn't in the mood for that kind of religious debate at a time like this.

"And if I were someone who believed he had a plan…" Bones continued.

"Which I do," Booth said (He might be doubtful about the precise details of that plan, but fulfilling his destiny had gone a long way to helping him accept that there was _some_ purpose towards all this).

"Then I'd be tempted to think He wanted me to go through something like I went through because it might make me more open to the whole… concept," Bones concluded.

"It obviously hasn't," Booth noted, turning his attention back to the front of the church.

"I'm OK with you thanking God for saving me and Hodgins," Bones said.

"That's not what I thanked Him for," Booth said (He hoped Cordelia wouldn't mind about the gender shift he was using right now; he had to keep up appearances, after all). "I thanked Him for saving… all of us. It was all of us. Every. Single. One. You take one of us away, and you and Hodgins are in that hole forever. And I'm thankful for that."

He'd appreciated the team's skills in the past, but this was the first time when he'd needed all of them; if he'd had anyone else working with him, or if anyone else had been taken, then the missing people would be dead…

"I knew you wouldn't give up," Bones said, her voice breaking slightly as she spoke.

"I knew you wouldn't give up," Booth repeated back at her, smiling slightly at his partner.

They might disagree on some things, but they knew that they could always count on each other; in a world like this, that was the most important thing you could ever find.


	33. The Headless Witch in the Woods

"It's getting thicker and thicker in here," Bones said as they continued to walk through the woods that were the scene of their latest crime, just behind the forest ranger assigned to direct them to the location.

"That's why a forensic team got lost," Ranger Edison explained. "I've sent somebody back to find them."

"Look, you sure you know where you're going?" Booth asked, looking apprehensively at his surroundings; time may no longer be a factor in his work now that sunlight wasn't an issue for him any more, but that didn't mean he wanted to get lost in here.

"I still have trouble and I've been here for three years," the ranger said. "That's why we advise hikers to stay away."

"I know, I'm pining for concrete," Booth said, glancing back at his partner as he continued walking. "You just, uh, you stay close, alright Bones? I don't want you to get caught out here when it gets dark, OK?"

Turning around, he was only slightly surprised to see that she'd wandered off; Bones might be intelligent, but she was too damn independent at times…

"Bones? Bones?" he called out, as he began to hurry back the way he'd come. "Where the hell are you, Bones?"

"I'm right here, Booth," Bones said, her voice too low for Booth's taste.

"Don't do that, all right?" Booth said, walking around the small gathering of trees to where his partner was standing.

"What?" Bones asked, turning to look at him.

"Take off like that, OK?" Booth said. "You heard the guy."

"I saw this," Bones explained, indicating a strange, vaguely oval-shaped object, made of a disturbing combination of bone, wood, and something in the middle that he couldn't quite identify visually as either a piece of wood or a leaf, hanging on a tree branch above them. "It's some sort of talisman. These are bones from a bird and the colouring on that ornament looks like dried blood. There are more of them, too."

"Geez, they look like eyes," Booth said, his mind briefly attempting to compare them to something in his experience before discarding that effort as pointless; he just didn't know enough about witchcraft to know for sure if these were real or not.

"OK, this is weird…" he said, noting some of the other ornaments scattered around the trees before he looked back at Edison. "You see a lot of these?"

"Not me, but I've heard some other folks have come across some pretty strange stuff in here," Edison said. "Word is, it's Maggie Cinders."

"There's a woman who lives out here?" Bones asked.

"Did," Edison replied, his previous apprehension making it clear that they were talking about more than an old local recluse even before Edison continued his story. "Died in 1780. Folks around here thought she was a witch and beheaded her. Legend is, she still haunts the woods, looking for her severed head."

"And you believe this, Ranger Edison?" Bones asked, even as Booth quickly went over what he knew and remembered of witches; the scenario described wasn't _impossible_ , but he was fairly sure ghosts didn't hang around looking for missing body-parts unless they were Egyptians who'd convinced themselves that they _should_ remain…

"Look, I'm just telling you what I've heard," Edison said.

"Yeah, I'd prefer we keep moving, OK?" Booth said, wanting to get the conversation away from ghosts as they continued along the path for a few more minutes until he saw the distinctive yellow of crime scene tape in a more open area.

"This is one of the only clearings around here," Edison explained as he lifted the tape to allow them access. "The pit was covered with sticks and leaves. One of the hikers fell in on the body, freaked and ran. Maggie Cinders did say she'd kill anybody who dared to look for her."

"So you talked to Ms. Cinders?" Bones said, looking bluntly at Edison. "That must have been difficult since she doesn't have a head. Bag the eyes. Give me a hand."

"You want me to go down there with you?" Booth said, Bones advancing towards the central pit as he briefly noted the additional eye-talismans around this area.

"No," Bones said. "I don't want the remains compromised."

"Right," Booth said, glad for the excuse not to get in the hole- it was too grave-like for his tastes-, helping his partner in before he turned the conversation back to Edison. "So, how'd she kill them? You know, in the legend?"

"Like she was killed," Edison replied. "She cuts off their heads."

"Iliac crest and pubis show it's a male," Bones said, her voice giving Booth something else to focus on beyond unpleasant recollections of other ghosts as she searched over the body before her. "Epiphyseal fusion puts him between eighteen and twenty-five years old. He's on a- a video camera."

"OK," Booth said, filing the camera away as something to consider later. "Cause of death?"

"Well," Bones said, her torchlight examining the corners of the pit, "since I can't find a skull, I'd say… his head got cut off."

 _Great_ , Booth thought with a frustrated groan.

So much for an easy case; he was going to have to spend some time checking this over with his remaining magic-based 'tools' in secret just to make sure that there wasn't an _actual_ ghost involved in this mess…

* * *

  
Sitting opposite Lori Mueller, Booth tried not to think too much about his past experience with this kind of institution; Drusilla was the most obvious example of someone who should have had better treatment, but then there were the likes of Sir Andrew Landry and other enemies of Angelus, driven mad because he found it more fun than just killing them…

"I checked back in because I couldn't sleep," Lori said, the young woman's long red hair framing an attractive yet haunted face. "I haven't slept for days."

"Thanks for meeting with me, Lori," Booth said, trying to sound warm without being too pushy.

"Sure," Lori said, smiling slightly at him. "There's not much else to do in here."

"Hey," he continued, trying to find the kindest way to phrase this, "do you mind if I ask you what happened that night in the woods?"

"I've told the police everything," Lori said. "But Graham is the only one that can make things right. He just got a little lost in there but when he gets back, he's going to make sure that I'm safe again."

"Graham," Booth said, his hopes for her condition already faltering; she was talking as though a guy who'd been missing for this long was still going to just show up. "He promised to take care of you?"

"Well, sure," Lori said, a slight smile on her face. "He's my boyfriend. He doesn't want anything to happen to me."

"Your boyfriend?" Booth repeated.

"We keep it a secret," Lori said, leaning over and whispering to him. "Other girls get jealous. Everyone loves Graham. Did… did you… go into the woods? Is that why you're here?"

"Yeah," Booth said.

"You found Graham?" Lori said, her expression becoming more urgent as she continued to speak. "He said he was going to talk to Maggie. Is that where you found him?"

"He wasn't with Maggie," Booth said, stuck for a better way to phrase this.

"Oh no," Lori said, her expression becoming increasingly horrified as she repeated her denial over and over, knowing what he was about to say without him needing to say it.

"Lori?" Booth said, looking anxiously at her. "Lori, calm down."

"She killed him!" Lori said.

"Lori," Booth said. "Lori, we need to know what happened."

"That's what happened!" Lori said.

"We need to know what happened to him," Booth said; maybe if he focused on the facts, he'd manage to get through Lori's mental state…

"Did she take his head?" Lori said, Booth's silence once again answering the question. "Oh God, no! The blood! I- I called for help, but Brian wasn't there!"

Even as an orderly hurried over to try and restrain Lori, she continued to scream about blood and call for help from Graham, leaving Booth helpless to do anything more than sit and look at her, regretting how circumstances had forced him to bring up such a horrific memory for a clearly traumatised girl…

Sometimes he forgot how far people could fall without the real supernatural involved.

* * *

  
"Lori was not Graham's only girlfriend," Bones said as she examined Graham's remains in one of the site rooms, speculatively discussing the recent information she'd found out from Graham's brother. "He had lots of girlfriends, but he somehow managed to keep them secret from each other."

"So what would happen if a very jealous Lori found out?" Booth said contemplatively.

"I don't know," Bones said as she continued to examine the bone in her hand. "That's more your territory."

"What?" Booth said, looking at her inquiringly. "What? What; am I cheating?"

"I just meant that you use psychology," Bones said, smiling as she looked up from her work at him. "You're very touchy. Perhaps because of all your skulking around…"

"I am discreet, OK?" Booth said. "It's different; a gentleman is discreet, OK?"

"What are we talking about?" Zack asked, looking bemusedly between the two of them.

"Nothing that concerns you," Booth said, glaring at the intern.

"But I'm quite literally in the middle of the conversation and it seems very interesting," Zack said, before Booth folded his arms and glared at the younger man. "However, your glaring indicates that I shouldn't press for further information."

"Good genius," Booth said, nodding at Zack before he looked back at Bones. "So, Lori loves Graham, thinks he loves her but finds out that he doesn't, so she goes all O.J. on him. Ah, that's a perfect cover, right? 'Headless witch did it, not me'. The whole insanity thing might be an act."

He didn't completely believe that assumption- he'd seen insanity, and Lori was definitely not fully _corpus mentus_ -, but for the sake of his impartial investigator status, he had to at least consider it.

"But the victim sustained extensive defensive wounds," Zack said. "This was a very powerful attacker."

"Oh, you know," Booth suggested, trying to sound more casual than he really felt, "when a woman finds out that a man has been cheating on her, she can get pretty mad."

The attention he received from the two squints after that statement was more than he needed to realise how they had just interpreted what he'd said.

"That's what I heard," he said defensively; he'd never cheated on _anyone_ as Angel, girls knew what they were getting into by sleeping with him when he was Liam, and Angelus had operated on a completely different set of social standards that didn't incorporate cheating as an issue. "OK, look, we got motive and opportunity; it fits."

"No, it doesn't fit," Bones said firmly. "Graham Hastings was 5' 10" and 176 pounds. Lori is 120, tops. The injuries aren't consistent with a woman Lori Mueller's size."

"Of course, "Cam said as she walked into the room, "people on PCP have been known to exhibit extraordinary strength."

"PCP?" Booth said, his mind flashing to the old Sunnydale PD excuse for vampire attacks before he pushed that aside; Cam and the rest of the team would _not_ go in for 'Sunnydale Syndrome'. "Who was on PCP?"

"Hodgins' report on the organic matter from the baggy found at the scene showed that it contained psilocybe mushrooms injected with phencyclidine," Cam said.

"Whoa," Booth said; he couldn't recall the last time he'd encountered a PCP case that was _actually_ a PCP case. "What a trip."

"Well," Zack said, "if Lori ingested those, it's possible she could've caused Graham's injuries."

"Not to mention," Cam pointed out, "combining dissociative anesthetics with hallucinogenic compounds can have a devastating effect on people with fragile brain chemistry."

"So her mental condition is probably genuine," Bones said.

"You know what," Booth said, taking the presented opportunity to end this particular discussion, "I'm going to go talk to my good old buddy Brian; see if he knows anything about the Magical Mystery Tour that Lori might've been on that night."

At least he had further evidence that he wasn't dealing with an actual supernatural crisis this time around; that just left the question of what he _was_ dealing with here…

* * *

  
As he finished his phone conversation with the forensics team about where to look for the missing clothing, Booth only had to look in his partner's direction to be reminded of what he was trying to avoid.

God, relationships as a human were _complicated_ …

"What?" he said, trying to act as though he didn't know what Bones was trying to prompt him into talking about. "He was being a baby."

"I didn't say anything," Bones said.

"But you're looking at me like…" Booth began, before he came up with the appropriate phrase for someone his physical age. "I'm in trouble and you're a teacher."

"You're very touchy lately, Booth," Bones said, looking at him with slight concern.

"Look, Bones," Booth said- they'd come to this point, so he might as well just go along with it-, "I don't know why I didn't tell you about Cam."

"Did I mention Cam?" Bones asked,

"I just… didn't want it to get weird, I guess," Booth said, feeling the inadequacy of that statement.

"Weird?" Bones repeated.

"We're partners, you know?" Booth said, feeling uncomfortable about this topic even as he tried to define what had eluded definition for him practically since he'd started working with her. "Together all the time, right? You're a woman and I'm a man and I never had a relationship like this where we were - like two guys, except you're not… ya know… a guy. Yeah."

It was a complicated way of saying it, but it was true enough; discounting his female associates as Angelus, his long-term history of friendly female acquaintances since he regained his soul consisted of brief conversations with Willow who was more Buffy's friend than his, a few dates with Nina, the complicated relationship with Buffy, his developing familial-then-romantic bond with Cordelia, his older-brother-esque relationship with Fred once she got over her initial crush, the not-quite-real relationship he'd had with Dawn (He remembered seeing her as a second Kathy before losing his soul and had tried to put things back together after returning from Hell, but he also knew that he'd technically never actually _met_ her then)…

"No," Bones said, slightly bemused at his turn of phrase. "No, I'm not. Should I feel odd about… wanting to hang out with Will?"

"No, of course not," Booth said. "You know, because essentially… I mean… you're a guy like me. But not really."

God, he was starting to sound like Xander in the early days of the Scoobies; he was talking a load of crap because he had _nothing_ more sophisticated coming to mind right now…

"That would mean that, to _me_ , you are essentially a woman," Bones said, pausing to ponder that scenario. "Yeah, I can see that."

"No, no, no," Booth said, inwardly cursing this vivid demonstration of how his ramble had left him in more trouble, even if it was just ridiculous rather than emotionally dangerous. "I'd prefer not to be a woman, if you don't mind."

"I'm merely trying to follow your reasoning, Booth," Bones said.

"OK, fine, what do you say we just, you know, we'll drop it for now?" Booth said, unbelievably grateful when his phone rang with further news on the case; at least it gave him something else to talk about other than this increasingly embarrassing conversation…

* * *

  
Walking into the restaurant, Booth wished that Bones didn't look so happy when he saw her sitting opposite the man he'd come here to arrest; he might be confident that the evidence had led them to this point, but that didn't mean he wanted to hurt his partner after she'd found someone who made her feel that relaxed…

"Booth," Bones said, looking up at him with a smile that was evidently because of whatever she'd just been talking about. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm sorry," Booth said, leaning over briefly to talk to her before focusing his attention on her date as he sat down at the table. "You're under arrest for the murder of your brother, Graham Hastings."

"What?" Will Hastings said.

"You have the right to remain silent," Booth continued.

"What is this, Booth?" Bones said, looking sharply at him.

"He did it," Booth said, looking directly at his partner to ensure that she understood how serious he was being in this situation. "Cam found his blood on the axe and Hodgins found chemicals that only a firefighter would have access to."

"I didn't kill Graham," Will said, even as Bones's horrified expression confirmed that she believed his story. "We fought, that's all."

"You were out there in the woods that night?" Bones said.

"Please don't look at me like that," Will said, holding up a defensive finger. "Please… I was just helping my brother. He said the film was going to make him famous."

"So you got the animal bones, the blood, and you made the chopping sound with the axe," Booth concluded; he could almost appreciate the guy wanting to help his brother if it wasn't for what happened afterwards.

"He wanted me to stay out of sight," Will said, Bones's eyes shimmering with unshed tears as she listened to the story. "But the girl, Lori, he slipped her drugs and she was screaming and I said I wasn't going to help anymore. And I said I wouldn't throw the blood on her, so he did it, and she went crazy and you saw her. Graham did that to her."

"Will…" Bones said, horror growing as she stared at him.

"I had to stop him, OK?" Will said. "I can't be responsible for raising a monster like that."

"So you hit him with the axe," Booth said, his sympathy for Hastings' plea virtually non-existent; he might have killed Penn for the same reason, but there was a difference between killing a demon who could never change and killing a screwed-up human being who might have been redeemable with the right kind of therapy whose only real 'crime' was getting caught up in his work…

"He was just lying there, and I was waiting for him to move," Will continued, a desperate edge to his voice. "And I've never… I never even hit him before, no matter how difficult he got."

"And then you chopped off his head and you buried him to make it look like some witch did it," Booth finished.

"No," Will said firmly, a fanatical gleam in his eyes at this part of his story. " _She_ did it. She did it. Maggie Cinders was out there that night and she made me do it. She told me never to tell anybody. Maggie Cinders made me cut off his head. That's the only way it could happen. You know me. He was my brother. I could never kill my own brother. It was her."

The tears in Bones's eyes would have been all that Booth needed to confirm what he had to do, even if he hadn't known that the scenario described was impossible; ghostly possessions didn't work the way that Will was describing, and the ghosts _definitely_ didn't leave messages like that afterwards.

"What are you waiting for, Booth?" she asked, standing up to leave as Booth moved to stand behind Will, reciting his usual speech about the victim's rights almost on automatic as the man continued to call after Bones while protesting his 'innocence'. He didn't know if the guy genuinely believed the crap he was sprouting about Maggie or if he'd just convinced himself of it to cope with his guilt, but the fact remained that the guy was mentally unstable and clearly needed to be put away for a long time.

As much as it hurt his partner, this had to be done if justice was to be served; he'd just have to talk to Bones about this relationship mess later…


	34. Judas on a Pole

"What was with Zack back there?" Booth asked as he and Bones walked towards their current crime scene on top of a motel roof, depicting a badly charred skeleton hanging from a wooden T; it might be out-of-character for him to interrupt Bones while she was assessing the corpse to determine cause of death, but considering how it affected on their team he felt that a break in pattern was only natural.

"Defending his dissertation, last step before he gets his Doctorate," Bones explained, before she picked up a small pile of organs lying in front of the body. "I think these are what's left of his intestines."

"Is he going to make it?" Booth asked.

"No, he's very dead," Bones said, laughing slightly at her own joke (Which at least showed that she was recognising when something was a joke, rather than deliberately misinterpreting his question).

"I mean Zack," Booth said; Bones's ability to joke was improving, but that wasn't useful right now.

"Uh… fifty/fifty," Bones said, as she examined the body's fingers.

"He's a stoolie," Booth noted as he glanced at the intestines on the floor before them, briefly put in mind of some of the more symbolic punishments he'd inflicted during his time as Angelus; the severity of them varied depending on the mood he was in and his reasons for targeting them, but the principle was still sound.

"Zack?" Bones said, looking back at him.

"Our victim," Booth clarified. "Ya know, he's a rat. Snitch."

"What makes you say that?" Bones asked.

"His guts got spilled, alright?" Booth said, indicating the pile below their victim. "Spill your guts?"

"Very literal," Bones noted.

"Yeah," Booth said. "Hang up there like a scarecrow on a rooftop of a hotel used to house witnesses; it's a warning."

As Bones reached down the victim's throat to examine something stuck down it, Booth had a feeling that this case was about to become far more complicated than the hit this appeared to be…

* * *

  
"What you're asking is the kinda thing that destroys careers," Caroline said, Booth left with little else to do but try and eat a dough ball as he listened to his friend in the diner. "From the time I was a little girl, I dreamed of putting bad men in jail- put that back- which is why I became an Assistant United States Attorney."

"OK," Booth said, ignoring the dismissal of his attempt to grab a snack as he looked at his friend. "Look, you don't have to help me-"

"Of course I have to help you," Caroline said, glaring at him. "Marvin Beckett is still a hero to a lot of African Americans; some of us never believed he killed this FBI boy. Now you buy me breakfast, tell me you found a way to clear his name, release him out of wrongful incarceration after thirty years? I can not walk away- which you already know."

"Maybe you should have some more coffee…" Booth began, trying not to look so surprised at the fact that Caroline had hit him as well as distracting himself from the point Caroline had brought up that he'd tried not to consider earlier; in his experience, conspiracies involved people willing to go to great lengths to cover them up…

"Of course I want more coffee," Caroline said indignantly. "We have to come up with our plan of attack."

"OK," Booth said. "Well, I was thinking Judge Moran…"

"We should exhume Gus Harper," Caroline said firmly. "See if your genius, scientist partner, can ascertain whether he _died_ in the manner the FBI said he died thirty years ago."

"Moran's got a long-" Booth began.

"No," Caroline interrupted. "We want Kemper."

"Hang 'em high Kemper?" Booth asked, looking incredulously at her.

"Hey, I'm ruining my career, I'm doing it my way, understand?" Caroline said. "Now, take a doughnut hole. I'm offering."

"Thanks," Booth said, taking the offered snack out of a lack of anything else to do.

Moments like this made him wish that he'd maintained contact with some people from Angel's life; Gunn's legal knowledge might have been an uncomfortable topic even before Illyria, but it definitely been useful during their time at Wolfram & Hart, and it wasn't exactly fair on Caroline to rely on her as their legal back-up at times like this…

* * *

  
"Delaney's murder, the threats on Russ's life; this is all happening now because of a little metal dolphin we found on your mother's grave," Booth said, looking at Bones as they waited in his office, Booth tossing the accumulated related files for this case onto his desk as he addressed Bones. "FBI field unit in Denver traced it to a local artist in Mead, Colorado."

"Who identified Dad as the buyer…" Bones finished, looking at the small dolphin in the plastic bag. "But Delaney left the FBI, fifteen years ago."

"And somebody told him about your dad," Booth concluded.

"And didn't tell you?" Bones asked.

"They're part of the conspiracy," Booth said.

"You must be annoyed," Bones said, looking thoughtfully at him.

"Yeah; you know what, I am," Booth said grimly. "And I don't like finding out there's a dirty FBI Agent in this building."

He might not have been affected them directly, but considering the trouble that Gwendolyn Post had posed for the Scooby Gang during her time in Sunnydale- particularly regarding the consequences of her presence for Faith's future with the group-, to say nothing of that black ops unit that had nearly killed Buffy and Faith after Faith got out of her coma, he felt that he was entitled to be particularly annoyed at the thought of conspiracy in an organisation created with the intention of protecting others…

With that said, he walked over and closed the door of his office; their earlier conversation had been awkward, but what they were about to discuss was too dangerous to chance anyone else overhearing it.

"Here's what I think happened," he said, as he turned back to look at Bones. "Delaney goes to your father, he asks him to hand over the evidence, he doesn't do it, he kills you or Russ."

"Dad calls Russ to warn him… and then… kills Delaney," Bones finished, a pained expression on her face at the thought.

"Guts him, burns him, leaves a calling card," Booth said. "Don't mess with Max Keenan's kids."

It was a grim message, but it was a message that Booth could agree with; after what he'd done to protect Connor from Wolfram & Hart, it wasn't something completely outside his experience.

"Am I supposed to like that?" Bones asked, her voice low and her expression reflecting how close she was to crying at that thought.

"Ya know, Bones," Booth said, looking solemnly back at her, "I'll take a stand up crook over a crooked cop any day of the week."

It was a legally complicated thing to say, but in this kind of situation Booth felt justified in making such a statement; honest criminals might seem like a contradiction, but at least men like her father had a code and stuck to it, even if he committed actions that others regarded as illegal.

In a weird way, he was relieved when Caroline showed up revealing that they had their warrant; things might be complicated, but at least they had some kind of plan to deal with things from here on in that saved him having to discuss that issue any more than he had to…

* * *

  
"You're what's known as a real pain in the ass, Agent Booth," Deputy Director Kirby said, glaring at Booth as he closed the door to the conference room, Booth sitting in a chair while two other agents stood outside.

"Yes, sir," Booth replied, his gaze fixed ahead of him, once again mourning the days when he had been free to express his opinion of his 'superiors'; Kirby was a dick who'd made it this far through political connections rather than any real investigative talent, but if he wanted to keep his job he had to just grin and bear it….

"I just had my testicles handed to me by the Attorney General of the United States of America," Kirby said, scorn in his voice as he paced behind Booth. "He wanted to know why this Marvin Beckett issue wasn't done slowly and carefully with greater forethought and tact. You know what I told him?"

"No, sir," Booth replied; this was more frustrating than dealing with the Oracles, since he was unable to actually _say_ what was on his mind out of fear of how Kirby would react.

"I told him, I did not know," Kirby said, leaning over to glare at Booth.

"Sir," Booth began- maybe if he had the chance to say his piece Kirby wouldn't be as angry as he might have been-, "I had to do it the way I did it because the FBI is-"

"Not. Your. Decision, Booth," Kirby said firmly. "You're suspended without pay. Gun, ID, Security card, please."

"Sir, I'm entitled to the reading of the charges against me," Booth said, trying to protest without making it obvious; he'd generally been good at these kind of games, but situations like this pushed him to the limit regarding what he'd be willing to tolerate, particularly when he couldn't be sure of the other party's motives…

"The charges against you, is that I was pissed upon from a very great height," Kirby said, glaring contemptuously at him. "You're outta here in ten minutes."

With nothing else to do, Booth removed his gun and badge and put them on Kirby's desk, already wondering what he was going to do next; without any official access to the case records, this was about to get _very_ complicated…

* * *

  
"Can they do that?" Bones asked, as the squint squad sat awkwardly around the darkened lab, Booth leaning on the rail in more casual attire than his usual clothing choice when here on a case. "Just kick you out without any warning?"

"Well, the two guys standing behind me, with the guns, seemed to think so," Booth said.

"As you can see," Zack put in from his position at a desk in the corner of the lab, "Harper's ribs and sternum were practically obliterated by the two shots to his torso."

"Zack," Angela said, turning her head slightly to address the intern behind her. "Booth got fired."

"Suspended, not fired," Bones corrected.

"Suspended's FBI speak for fired," Cam said, once again demonstrating the political knowledge that had gotten her the current job in the first place.

"You know what hurts the most?" Booth said, stuck for anything else he could say to lighten the current mood. "They took the car. Got no wheels."

"The bullets themselves, removed from the body, of course, but Hodgins found some very small fragments," Zack continued.

"Copper, lead, polymer," Hodgins said as he picked up the story. "This is a conspiracy, baby…"

"Guys," Cam said with a firm tone of interjection in her voice. "What we're dealing with here is that _Booth_ won't be working with us anymore."

"Well, I got my own gun," Booth said, avoiding looking at the group behind him. "It's just… God, why did they have to take the company car?"

"I assume the only way Booth can get his car back would be to solve the case on his own and that we'd help," Zack said, turning around to look at the team.

"Oh no," Booth said, getting up from the railing to look at the group; after what had happened the last time he'd tried to make a stand against a large force using him for their own purposes, he wasn't going to even ask anyone to do the same thing again. "No, no; I can't let you guys do that."

"Anyone that wants to help Booth, raise their hands," Bones said, followed by her and everyone else raising their hands.

It might be a bleak situation facing him, but the knowledge that these men and women were still willing to work with him when he didn't have anything official to contribute to their work apart from someone to do the physical work…

Booth wasn't sure he'd ever felt more grateful to know this assorted team of scientists and geeks than he did now; they knew at least some of what he'd been capable of, and they still accepted him.

"All right," Zack said, after everyone had lowered their hands, indicating a CGI-generated bullet on his computer screen heading for its target. "I reverse-engineered to find the most likely design of the bullets. After the bullet spread, lead pellets were released, like buckshot."

"Wait a second," Booth said, his eyes narrowing as he studied the bullet on the screen. "That's a home-made round invented back in the seventies."

"We're talking a military-issues, M40A1 sniper rifle," Hodgins put in.

"Nice," Booth said, nodding in approval at Hodgins' contribution.

"Dude," Hodgins said with a modest nod, "what you call being a 'conspiracy theorist', I call being well informed."

"Wait," Angela asked, "Gus Harper was murdered by a military sniper?"

"Who makes his own rounds," Booth added.

"Maybe we can compare it to the bullet that grazed Russ?" Bones asked.

"I'm a civilian," Booth pointed out grimly. "We don't have access to that round. Maybe Caroline can help us."

Things might be getting more and more complicated, but at least they still had each other to work on cracking this case…

* * *

  
"Why are you mad at me?" Booth asked as they sat in Bones's office, Booth on the couch while Bones sat at her computer.

"I need a gun," Bones said in frustration.

"No, you don't," Booth said; he couldn't believe they were going back to this argument after the discussions they'd had about this last year. "You got me; I'm your gun. You want equipment, here," he continued, placing his handcuffs on the table before him, "have these, alright. New division of labour; I shoot 'em, you cuff 'em."

"Why didn't you tell me you had Father Coulter under surveillance?" Bones asked, still staring at the computer screen.

"It is my job to find your dad and put him in prison," Booth replied (One of the parts of his job he felt more ambiguous about; in the past, he'd needed to justify potentially awkward decisions he'd made because he chose to make them, but nowadays he could do things like put people under surveillance and claim that he had to do them because of his job).

"And you don't think I'll help?" Bones asked, turning to look at him.

"What?" Booth said; every time he thought he understood women, he fell for one who turned everything he thought he knew about the gender on its head. "He's your father; I really don't think I should have to ask you to help?"

"He abandoned me, Booth," Bones pointed out. "And that's the best thing you can say about him."

"Your father lives by a certain code, and part of that code is defending his family by whatever means necessary," Booth replied.

"You mean killing people and setting their corpses on fire," Bones said grimly as she got up from her chair.

"Any means necessary sorta covers that," Booth said as he stood up to better address his partner.

"You respect him?" Bones asked.

"I'm just saying," Booth clarified, "in his world, he's a very honourable man."

"That's ridiculous," Bones said. "There's only one world; it's this one."

"Would that be the one world where you're mad at me for trying to catch your father or the other world where you actually want him caught?" Booth asked, ignoring the part of him that wanted to reveal to Bones how he had lived in a world beyond what she could imagine; it would just make it all more complicated and this was far from the right time to reveal his past as Angel to her.

"Neither," Bones said firmly.

"Well, you have to pick one," Booth countered (He vaguely registered someone walking into the office, but he was too caught up in the current debate to look and see who it was).

"Either," Bones said, the confusion on her face making it clear that even she wasn't sure what she was saying right now. "Both."

"Doctor Brennan, Agent Booth," Caroline said, drawing Booth's attention back to the earlier-registered visitors, which included Caroline and an older, well-built black man with greying hair and a moustache. "I thought you'd like to meet the reason we're all losing our jobs and gettin' shot at. This is Mr. Marvin Beckett."

"I wanted to thank you both, personally," Marvin Beckett said.

"You're welcome, Mr Beckett," Bones said, shaking the man's offered hand before Booth did the same.

"Thirty years ago, crooked Agents put me in jail for something I did not do," Beckett said, his tone solemn as he looked between them. "I did not kill the young FBI Agent, I did not steal the money, and I thank you for proving it to the world. That's why I'm here, to tell you to your face, to assure you I did not do those things. You freed an innocent man, and in return, I must warn you, the people that did this to me aren't just a bunch of corrupt cops. They serve masters of _much_ greater influence. You're looking to bring their world down around their ears. They will strike at you. Watch yourselves."

"Here's your list of snipers from the decade of disco," Caroline said, handing a sheet of paper to Booth as Beckett walked out of the office. "This time, I'm advising you; Duck."

"Anyone you know?" Bones asked, as he studied the list while Caroline walked out of the office.

"Yeah," Booth said, his eyes scanning the list and quickly identifying the most relevant name. "The ATF ref on the task force was a marine sniper, Robert Kirby."

The implications of that discovery made sense, but they were far from encouraging; Kirby's position would make it all too easy for their enemies to know how they were progressing their current case and when he should act to stop them…

* * *

  
Walking up to the diner, Booth smiled at the sight of the squints sitting around inside the building, enthusiastically celebrating with Zack about his recent promotion from intern to full-time Jeffersonian staff member (As well as the resolution of another case, even if this one was only semi-satisfactory from a legal perspective considering how the killers had either just been killed or managed to escape).

"What happened?" Bones asked, walking out to join him when she registered his presence.

"Uh, the, uh, the attorney general took one look at the evidence your father provided and, you know, he reinstated me," Booth said; he wished he could sound less awkward, but the situation had been so personal for Bones that he didn't feel right sounding more enthusiastic about the fact that her father had escaped again.

"I'm glad," Bones said, smiling at him.

"Listen," Booth said- he might as well get this done right now before things became more difficult-, "we, uh, found another burned body. Same place, same setup."

"Kirby?" Bones asked.

"I'm pretty sure it was Kirby's blood in your apartment," Booth said, holding up the coin he'd found in the victim's throat.

"Dad's still trying to warn people to leave me and Russ alone," Bones said.

"No, Russ is safe with your father," Booth corrected. "They're warning people to stay away from you."

The awkward expression on his partner's face revealed how conflicted she was about that knowledge more than words ever could have.

"You know what?" Booth said. "I'm sorry… that you had to go through it again. Watching your family drive off, leaving you behind… I'm sorry."

"My father is… is-" Bones began.

"He's your dad, and he loves you," Booth said, looking at Bones for a few moments to ensure that she understood what he was saying.

"You know," Bones said after a brief pause, looking out at the street in frustration, "I'm just… I'm just one of those people who doesn't get to be in a family. That's…"

"Listen, Bones, hey," Booth interjected, lifting her head up as he placed his finger under her chin to look her in the eyes, turning her around to face him once more. "There's more than one kind of family."

He knew what that meant more than most; he might have failed with his own biological family, but he'd found a new family after moving to Los Angeles, and never regretted the bonds he'd formed even after they'd ended.

After the two had stared at each other for a moment, the moment was broken when Zack suddenly began knocking on the window to get their attention; Booth wondered what the significance was of the orange-and-green hat Zack was wearing on his head, but had a feeling that he wouldn't want to know the answer because it would be so frustrating to listen to…

"Well, hell," Booth said, grinning broadly, "Zack got the job, right?"

"Come in and congratulate him," Bones said.

"Nah, you know he's your squints, not my squints…" Booth said; he didn't want to be one of those guys who dropped in on his friends' parties…

"No, Booth," Bones said, wrapping her arm around his and leading him towards the diner door, "we are, all of us, your squints."

That simple statement meant more to Booth than he could ever express; he might be glad to be human, but he always regretted having lost contact with his family from his days as Angel, so the knowledge that these people still saw him as any kind of family meant more to him than he could ever satisfactorily express.

Even Bones's weird request for him to pat Zack on the shoulder couldn't dim his mood; his partner was safe, he had his job back, and the squints would remain a team for the foreseeable future.

All was right in their own worlds for the foreseeable future…


	35. The Man in the Cell

As far as threats from the past coming back to haunt them went, Howard Epps might not be the most dangerous threat they could have faced- Booth could think of a few vampires he wouldn't like to deal with again even if he was still Angel-, but the guy was still not something to be sneezed at; the impact that he'd had on the woman sitting in front of him right now was proof enough of that.

"I'm no longer involved in Howard's life," Caroline Epps said, putting down a picture of her and Epps as she looked at the two of them.

"It's hard to believe, being his wife and all," Booth noted (He didn't actually believe she'd had any contact with Howard after their last case involving the psycho in question, but better to rule her out now than later).

"Ex-wife," Caroline corrected. "The judge signed my divorce papers last week."

"Why didn't it work out, exactly?" Booth asked; she seemed like a genuine victim, but deliberately trying to provoke her would be more likely to give him an honest response. "Was it a lack of quality time or all the women he bludgeoned to death?"

"I _thought_ I could help Howard, but he used me," Caroline said, glaring firmly at Booth. "I haven't had any contact with him in over six months."

"I'd like to place you in protective custody until we find him," Booth said, quickly amending his previous approach; everything she'd shown was too honest to be a deception.

"That won't be necessary," Caroline said, as she reached down to pick up her bag.

"Mrs. Epps," Bones said, "the women in Howard's life don't tend to live very long."

"I appreciate your concern, Doctor Brennan," Caroline said, looking neutrally back at the anthropologist, "but I've changed job, apartments-"

" _We_ found you," Booth interjected. "Hey, Howard could too."

"I have a new life and a new boyfriend," Caroline said, looking pleadingly between them. "Raymond's a good man. If he found out…"

"We all have secrets in our past, Mrs Epps," Bones said. "Admittedly, not as bizarre as yours, but you shouldn't risk your life just because you're embarrassed to tell your boyfriend the truth."

God, if Bones thought of Caroline's past as bizarre, what would she make of _his_ if she ever learned the truth about it…?

"Howard's interest is in young blonde girls," Caroline said solemnly. "I'm not even his type."

"If he contacts you-" Booth began, as Caroline got up from her seat and headed for the door.

"I'll call," Caroline said, looking briefly back at Booth before leaving the office.

"What-?" Bones began, looking indignantly at him. "You can't let her go! She's not safe!"

"Well, I can't force her to take protection, alright?" Booth said, getting up from his position on the edge of his desk to move back into his seat behind it. "I'll have the local police drive her house every couple of hours and make sure she's safe. And you know what? You're not safe either."

"But I'm not unhinged," Bones protested. "I can take care of myself."

"You and Epps… OK, it's personal," Booth said, looking grimly at his partner, his own memories of Angelus's issues with Buffy resurfacing; what Angelus and Epps hated about Buffy and Bones differed, but what he was about to say applied to both cases. "You're everything he hates."

"And what is that exactly?" Bones asked

"Well, you know, you're a smart, strong, confident woman," Booth said, allowing Bones to smile as he continued speaking, trying not to look at her in case it sparked thoughts he should _not_ be having. "And, uh, figured him out. You made him feel powerless so he's gonna want to, uh, prove that, uh, you're weak and inferior. So, you are not to go out on your own, ever."

He knew that Bones was unlikely to listen to him, but he had to make an effort; he couldn't keep an eye on his partner all the time, but he had to do what he could to keep her safe.

* * *

  
Walking up to the open door of Caroline Epps's old apartment, Booth held out his arm to halt his partner's further advance while using his other arm to open the already-unlocked door in front of them. Glancing back, he was only slightly surprised to see Bones holding her new gun while checking the barrel.

"You know," Booth said, partly unable to believe how 'gun-ho' his partner was being about this mess, "I could have the Bureau pull your license."

"Yeah, and I could assign Zack as your forensic anthropologist," Bones replied.

Accepting her point, Booth simply pulled out his gun and cautiously advanced into the apartment, Bones alongside him with her own weapon.

"Place hasn't been rented since she moved," Booth said, looking at the empty rooms around them, with no sign that anybody had ever even lived in this area.

"You know, it's just not logical," Bones said from her position behind him. "Playing games with us? It's just gonna lead us right to him."

Booth was about to make a comment about how serial killers preferred games for the fun of it combined with their own egos, but thoughts of explaining that issue were forgotten when Bones's attempts to turn the lights on met with failure just before he heard the sound of something humming in the next room.

"Wait," Bones said, following the direction of his gaze to the large, slightly old-fashioned fridge before them. "If the lights are off, then why is the refrigerator working?"

"Just… stand back," Booth said, moving towards the refrigerator as Bones checked another room, a quick glance over the refrigerator confirming its safety; Epps might be smart, but he wasn't technical enough to rig up a trap where the trigger wouldn't be visible right now.

"Well, it's not booby-trapped," he said, looking back at his partner as she examined another room. With Bones looking back at him, he opened the door, only to find himself looking at the grisly sight of Caroline Epps's head, sitting pathetically on the top shelf, blood pooling below the neck.

He'd seen and done a lot of sick things as Angelus, but there were times when he was amazed to see just how sick humans could be without the aid of demons; Epps had gone to this much effort to leave a goddamn clue…

* * *

  
As he charged towards the merry-go-round, Booth refused to even think about what had happened the last time his child had been in the vicinity of a murdering psychopath with a grudge against him; Epps wouldn't have the time to turn Parker into his twisted weapon- and it didn't seem like his style anyway-, but Booth was _not_ going to let _anyone_ touch his child again…

"Parker comes here every day at four with his nanny," Booth said briefly to Bones, giving her a brief explanation of how he could be so certain about this location, before he saw the nanny in question standing on the outskirts of the merry-go-round (His background checks might be overly paranoid, but they helped him remember faces). "Rose! Rose, where's Parker?"

"On the merry-go-round," Rose replied, looking at Booth in surprise before a glance at the ride in question showed that it was now empty. "He was just there!"

Booth barely stopped to think; ignoring the other children gathered around, he literally jumped onto the merry-go-round and began to call his son's name, his mind barely registering Bones and Rose doing the same on either side as he frantically sought his son, refusing to allow history to repeat itself in such a horrific manner…

The sound of his name only jarred his attention away from the roundabout because of how it disrupted the pattern, but when he followed Bones's attention to where Parker was standing near an ice-cream vendor, Booth running towards his son even as hi brain processed his presence

"Daddy!" Parker said, running towards him with an ice cream cone in his hand, Booth scooping his son up into his arms in relief.

"Look," Parker said, after Booth had put him down. "A man brought me ice cream."

"Alright," Booth said, immediately tossing the cone in question to the ground; Epps was probably too cocky to try something that obvious, but he wasn't about to chance it.

"That was my favourite," Parker said, looking upset.

"I'll buy you another one, OK?" Booth said, looking firmly at his son. "Just listen to me; what did this man look like?"

"A man," Parker replied. "He said he was your friend."

"What did he say to you?" Booth asked (He had to constantly tell himself to remain calm; Parker was only five, he couldn't be expected to have picked up much detail about someone when he didn't know it was going to be important later). "Did he say anything else to you, Parker?"

"To use my napkin," Parker said, looking at his fallen ice-cream.

"Booth," Bones said, picking up the napkin that had been wrapped around the cone and handing it to him, writing being revealed as he unfolded it.

"'My name is Parker. Ask me how I can solve this case'," Booth read, before he threw the napkin away and re-focused his attention on Parker. "Alright; what else did he tell you?"

"Nothing," Parker said, sniffing. "He was just nice."

"OK, just listen to me, Parker, all right?" Booth said. "This man is trying to hurt Daddy's friends, okay? So I need you to think. What else did he say to you?"

"I didn't do anything wrong," Parker protested. "He said he was your friend."

"You never talk to strangers, OK?" Booth said, his voice raising as he looked at his son; better to scare him now and make sure he remembered this later than let him forget it and repeat the whole mistake. "You never…!"

Seeing his son beginning to cry even before Bones placed a hand on his shoulder, Booth stopped yelling and focused on giving him a hug, unable to believe how far he'd almost gone. "I'm sorry, buddy. It's okay. Alright? I'm sorry."

"What's going on, Mr Booth?" Rose asked, looking at him in confusion.

"There's just an investigation going on, OK, Rose?" Booth said, looking at the young woman. "I'm gonna have these agents take you and Parker home and keep you safe. Alright?"

Pulling away from his son for a moment, Booth waited until Parker had nodded in acceptance before pulling him back into another hug.

"I'm sorry," he said, feeling the inadequacy of that statement but stuck for anything else to do. "It's OK."

He hated scaring his son like that, but if it was a choice between scaring Parker now and losing him later…

* * *

  
Sitting alongside Cam's bed during a quiet moment in the current case, Booth wondered if this was how Wesley had felt during that whole mess with Fred before Illyria had been released.

As much as they'd all come to accept Illyria as part of the group towards the end, the fact remained that she'd killed their friend and left Wesley emotionally and psychologically scarred; Fred's loss had ensured that Wesley would never be the same in the aftermath, and whatever 'comfort' Illyria had provided by reminding him of Fred had been simultaneously tainted by the very thing that let them tolerate her…

No.

Distracting himself by thinking of Illyria wouldn't work; he had to face facts right now.

The real reason he was so concerned about Cam's current condition… was that he _wasn't_ concerned.

He'd miss her if she died, of course, but he'd felt more concerned when Buffy was in hospital after he'd overdone it feeding on her while he was poisoned, and then he'd been fairly sure that she'd actually recover from it (He briefly recalled the time he'd been worried about Bones when she was abducted last year, but quickly pushed that aside; this was _not_ the time for that)…

The sensation of movement under his hands brought his attention back to the present, Booth looking at Cam in relief as she finally began to stir.

"Hey!" he said, squeezing her hand as Cam opened her eyes with a sickly wheeze for oxygen. "Welcome back."

"Why can't I breathe?" Cam gasped weakly, her voice virtually hoarse as she looked at him.

"Your saw," Booth explained. "It, um, it hit some kind of poison, but, uh, you're gonna be alright."

"Zack?" Cam asked.

"He's fine, OK?" Booth said, stilling holding onto her hand. "Everyone's… Everyone's good."

As Cam nodded, Booth felt a need to make a start on what he'd just realised he had to say; this probably wouldn't come across as effectively as he'd like, but if he didn't make a start now it would just be harder to do it later.

"I'm- I'm…" he began, looking down at the hand he held in his, trying to find the right words, before he looked back at her. "I'm so sorry, you know, that I put so much pressure on you to hurry. I didn't, uh -"

"Not your fault," Cam said, still wheezing as she weakly nodded at him in reassurance. "Epps did this to me."

"Hey," Booth said, trying to change the subject to something more amusing. "Your family's coming."

"Oh God," Cam said, coughing again. "And I thought poison… was my biggest problem."

The joke was weak, but Booth had to admit that it prompted a slight chuckle from him; after what she'd been through, it was good to see that she could still find something humorous…

* * *

  
As he slowly walked into Bones's apartment, Booth wasn't remotely surprised to find himself looking at Epps- the slicked back hair and the long coat made him look a bit like a tanned Spike, but that would just make this all the more enjoyable-; the man might consider himself to be some twisted genius, but after Booth's own years playing games as Angelus, he'd learned from both sides of the coin that the easiest mistake any genius could make was to forget that other people could be smart too.

"Dead end," he said as he aimed his gun at Epps, Bones emerging from the bathroom with a running shower behind her and a gun in her hand aimed at Epps.

"You won't let me shoot him, will you?" Bones asked.

"You knew he was gonna be here, didn't you?" Booth countered; the shower thing might have been a basic trap, but so many people overlooked the basics that it was more than enough for this purpose.

"It's the only scenario that made sense," Bones responded.

"Oh, what," Booth said, his attention returning to Epps as the killer glanced at the open door behind him, "you heading for the balcony, Howie? Hope you can fly, cause that's about a fifty foot drop, right?"

"Yeah," Bones said, attention still fixed on Epps.

"How did you know?" Epps asked.

"Plaster dust in the poison," Bones commented.

"Renovations to the apartment next door," Booth put in.

"You're not all that smart, turns out," Bones said, perfectly highlighting Booth's own thoughts on the matter; Epps wasn't exactly stupid, but he'd been so keen to leave clues to mock them that he'd left too many.

"One minute," Epps said, staring coldly at his partner. "All I want is one minute alone with you."

"Fine with me," Bones said, making it clear how that minute would go if she had her way.

"Don't provoke the lunatic, alright?" Booth said, before looking at Epps. "You've got nowhere to go."

"I'm not going back to jail," Epps said.

"You see, that's really not your decision, Howie," Booth said. "Get your hands up. Drop the crowbar."

On reflection, that last comment was where things had gone wrong. As though only just reminded what he was specifically holding, Epps hurled the crowbar at Booth's head. He managed to avoid the weapon, but the crowbar still broke a lamp on a table behind him, with the distraction giving Epps time to run for the door.

"In the line of fire, Bones," Booth called out, not wanting his partner to shoot him by accident as he ran after Epps, grabbing the killer's right hand as the guy vaulted off the balcony.

It might be more than he deserved, but the guy wasn't going to die like this…

"You're not getting away, Howard," he said, glaring at Epps, barely conscious of Bones hurrying over to join him.

"Look who the killer is now, Agent Booth," Epps said; Booth was sure that the guy had been holding on to the balcony earlier, but now he was just hanging by Booth's outstretched arm and nothing else…

"A little help here, Bones?" Booth called over to his partner. "I got nothing but dead weight here. Help me."

"Sorry," Bones said, after a few moments of reaching for the outstretched arm confirmed that she was unable to make contact; the angle just wasn't right. "Can't reach."

"Grab the railing," Booth called over, still straining to keep a hold as he glared at Epps.

"You're gonna drop me anyway," Epps said, what could have almost been fear on his face if Booth hadn't known he was dealing with a sociopath. "Just get it over with."

"You son of a bitch," Booth said, glaring at Epps; there were times when the fact that killers like Epps thought that everyone thought like them was a useful edge, but at moments like this…

"Are you saying you don't want me dead?" Epps countered.

"Yeah," Booth retorted; if it was possible, he preferred putting the human criminals in jail to reflect on what they'd done, even when he'd been Angel. "I'm not you."

"Oh, really?" Epps said, that frustrating self-satisfied smirk on his face despite the fear still in his eyes. "You're not thinking of the world with me still in it? Going after Doctor Brennan, your son-"

"I'm not you," Booth repeated, still straining to hold on to Epps's arm…

He didn't even remember when he specifically let go.

As Epps fell to the pavement below, Booth barely even registered the other sounds around him, his gaze focused on the man he'd failed to save.

Maybe Epps hadn't deserved to live, but prison would have been easier than what was waiting for him now…

* * *

  
Walking back after putting Parker back on the merry-go-round, Booth wasn't even particularly surprised to see Bones standing nearby; it sometimes seemed that very little- with the obvious exception of issues relating to her family- could make Bones stop when she really wanted to do something.

"Hi," he said, walking over to her. "How'd you know I was here?"

"Saturday morning," Bones replied, indicating the roundabout behind them. "How's Parker?"

"Yeah, I'm afraid I freaked him out the other day," Booth said, walking away from the roundabout as they spoke. "He's really scared of this place. Now I gotta put that right."

"That's you all over- putting things right," Bones said, sitting down next to him on a nearby bench, allowing them to look at Parker without being too obvious about it. "Cam gets released from the hospital today."

"Yeah," Booth said, after a moment's silence.

"What?" Bones asked, looking curiously at him.

"You know," he said- what he was about to say was crap, but it was the best he could come up with to justify his decision to everyone else without getting into things _he_ wasn't ready to talk about-, "what happened to Cam happened because… we had a personal relationship."

"Had?" Bones repeated curiously.

"Yeah," Booth said; thank God for official regulations for providing him with a cover for this mess. "People who work in… high-risk situations; they can't be involved… romantically because it… leads to things like what happened."

"High-risk situations," Bones repeated.

"Every single day it's with us," Booth said firmly, his mind flashing back to his and Buffy's attempts to fight together even after they'd learned about the clause on his soul; that might have been a particularly extreme example, but what it had highlighted still applied. "There's this line, and… we can't cross it. You know what I'm saying?"

"Yes," Bones said. "I understand."

Booth just hoped that she got what he was really trying to say without understanding the meaning behind it; that was something he wasn't even entirely he was ready to admit to _himself_ right now, never mind anyone else.

He still had no idea how he was going to help Parker get over his recent panic, and then there was this whole mess with how he felt about everything...

God, life had been easier when the clause was there as an excuse.


	36. The Girl in the Gator

If there was one thing Booth hated about relying on official paperwork to get anywhere in his current job, it was the need to be evaluated by a psychiatrist after 'difficult experiences'; he'd endured so much crap over his years as Angel- Liam had a pretty easy life and Angelus couldn't go mad as he had never experienced anything that he'd find that psychologically disturbing-, even without his time in Hell taken into account, that he was pretty sure he would have gone crazy already if he was going to. All that could be accomplished by a meeting with a psychologist was putting himself in a position where he might let the truth about himself slip because he had to be 'honest', which was why he tried to avoid getting in this kind of position before now…

Still, he was here now- the fact that the appointment was at the guy's home rather than an office was a surprise, but he supposed the guy was trying to be 'informal'-, so all he could do was try and get through it without letting too much slip before he was declared mentally competent to get back in the field.

Walking up to the house, he was surprised to find a man in a grey sleeveless pullover and a dark blue checked shirt, long hair hanging down over his forehead and ears and a prominent nose, working on what looked like a barbeque in the front garden.

"Doctor Wyatt?" he said.

"Ah, Agent Booth, is it?" the man said, standing up and smiling at Booth as he held out his hand. "Yes. Gordon, Gordon Wyatt."

"Right… You're the shrink?" Booth said, surprised at how relaxed the man was about his appearance; he'd yet to encounter a psychiatrist who didn't think dressing up in a suit would improve his appearance, but this guy actually appeared rather nonchalant about his appearance.

"Uh, shrink, yes, meaning psychiatrist," Wyatt said, a slightly bemused tone the only sign of surprise.

"That's great, Doc," Booth said, pulling the form out of his pocket and holding it out to the other man; he might as well just be direct about this issue and hope for the best. "How's about you just sign my piece of paper here and I'll get back to work?"

"Uh, certainly," Wyatt said, dismissing Booth's subsequent attempt to pass him a pen. "No, no, I have a pen."

"OK," Booth said, relieved at how straightforward this seemed to be; he'd be back in action in no time…

"Do you mind if I ask what exactly it was that you did?" Wyatt asked, pausing just as he was about to sign the paper.

"Yeah," Booth said, making his tone abrupt. "I shot a truck."

"Ah, full of terrorists, no doubt?" Wyatt said, smiling in understanding. "Or plutonium, or fleeing felons, was it?"

"No," Booth said; he was sure that Wyatt knew what the truck had actually been- that guy's expression was too eager for him to be ignorant-, but he couldn't exactly argue about the guy's methods without getting himself in more trouble, and now he was stuck admitting to what he'd done all over again. "It was an ice cream truck."

"Do you have a good reason for firing on it?" Wyatt asked, looking quizzically at him.

"Yeah," Booth said, fully aware of the inadequacy of his explanation as he gave it. "The music… it was bothering me."

"Ahhh," Wyatt said.

"Yeah, there was a speaker in the clown's mouth," Booth continued, stuck for anything else to do as Wyatt just 'oh'ed in response to that statement as well. "Yeah, I just pulled out my gun, you know, and… it was gone."

"So the FBI sent you to me, because you shot a clown?" Wyatt asked, putting the lid on his pen and folding the form up.

"Not a real clown!" Booth protested; he had enough problems without this guy saying things that could imply that he'd killed someone.

"I suggest you cogitate on the underlying reasons you shot that clown while I make us some tea," Wyatt said, handing the form back to Booth

Booth had no idea how he was supposed to react to that; he couldn't even remember the last time he'd been in the presence of tea- he wasn't sure if Wesley had ever drunk any, he'd never socialised enough with Giles for that to be a factor, and nobody else he'd known had any particularly strong feelings towards the drink-, and who the hell used words like 'cogitate' any more?

* * *

  
"Oh, splendid!" Wyatt said, examining Booth's progress on the barbeque pit as the agent examined the boundaries he'd set up around the pit area; the guy might have some odd ideas about how to 'assimilate', but at least he was putting some effort into it. "So it was your father who taught you to read plans, was it?"

"Wrong tree doc; Dad and I were tight," Booth said (It was a lie in either set of memories, but that was an issue he wasn't willing to talk about to someone he'd only just met, especially when he was _sure_ that issue had nothing to do with his recent actions).

"No, it's just that earlier you said that you weren't used to drinking tea with men," Wyatt said. "Which suggests to me that you're usually pretty rigid with your assignment of gender roles."

"What?" Booth said, looking at Wyatt in surprise; the implications of that statement might be varied, but he could definitely put an end to speculation that the obvious explanation was an accurate assessment of his mental state. "No, no! My partner is a woman, 'kay? A woman who needs my help."

"But are you currently involved with anyone?" Wyatt asked.

"Just broke up with someone, OK?" Booth said; the Cam thing might have been awkward and somewhat confusing at the time, but at least the ending was definitive. "ME! And I ended it."

"And… how long had you been involved with her?" Wyatt asked. "Or… him?"

"Her," Booth said firmly (Angelus had indulged once or twice, but that was Angelus and it had more been about some freaky dominance vampire-psychology thing that he just didn't get when he was human). "Let's get that straight, OK? _Her_! Couple months this time."

"This time?" Wyatt asked with a probing expression, Booth cursing his slip of the tongue even as he knew he had to commit himself to explaining that particular detail now.

"We got off… we'd gone out before," he explained, stuck for anything else he could say now that he'd brought that issue up; he wasn't even sure why he'd started seeing Cam again himself, and had serious doubts about his ability to explain that issue to someone else, even if he had to do it now. "A few years ago, and… y'know, we… I broke it up, and my ex wanted to give it another go."

"Complicated," Wyatt said, in a manner that suggested he understood even as Booth knew that things were far more complicated than that; what with the way things had fallen apart with Buffy, and his possible relationship with Cordelia being cut so abruptly short before either of them could explore it further…

"Ahhh, that's it!" Booth said, seizing on the possible explanation that had just occurred to him; it was a bit weak, but maybe it would make more sense to Wyatt. "I shot the clown because I can't let go of the women in my life! Ah, thanks doc! Now I can go back to work, and you can sign the paper!"

"Excellent theory, but quite wrong and you're out of time," Wyatt said, dismissing Booth's attempt to hand the form to him once more. "Tomorrow all right for you?"

Booth really hated his life right now; no matter what he did, he was stuck talking to a guy who just wouldn't give up trying to get inside his head because he had no idea what was really in there, bringing up irrelevant issues and questions that risked exposing his biggest secret when he was nowhere near ready for it…

* * *

  
Waiting outside Wyatt's house, Booth knew that what he was attempting was a long shot, but he was increasingly finding himself stuck for further ideas; since therapy probably wasn't going to get anywhere, given his inability to be totally honest with this guy, his best chance was to be direct and hope for the best.

"Oh," Wyatt said as he opened the door.

"Hi," Booth said; as always, the direct approach was the best one.

"Do we have a schedule?" Wyatt asked, in that tone that showed he knew they didn't but was going along with this turn of events to find out more (The guy was surprisingly hard and easy to read; it was rather confusing).

"Uh, listen," Booth said- God, things like this always seemed fine until you actually had to do them- as he pulled out the form, "I really need to get back to work, so why don't you just give me one of those clown restraining orders and sign my paper?"

"Have you had an insight as to why you shot at that clown?" Wyatt asked, just as Booth's phone started to ring.

"Yeah, you know what, I have some insight; it's right here," Booth said, pointing to his cellphone as he pulled it out of his pocket. "It's my Bones calling, my partner, right?"

Not giving Wyatt a chance to question his choice of terms, he quickly answered the phone, leaving Wyatt to close the door of his house as he turned around to talk to her in private. "Yeah, Bones?"

" _So when are you coming back again_?" Bones asked, sounding slightly bored.

"What, aren't you playing nice with Sully?" Booth said; he knew from experience that Bones could be tricky to work with, but he'd thought that Sully's manner would make it easier for her to get along with him.

" _I'm just not sure how serious he is about his job_ ," Bones clarified.

"Well, look, he's one of the best, all right?" Booth said, feeling the need to defend his colleague even if he got her point; he could never understand why Sully would join the FBI and continue studying for so many other varying jobs. "He just likes to keep his options open."

" _I've noticed_ ," Bones said (Booth thought it sounded like she was eating, but he wasn't going to criticise her for that; knowing her, she'd been so busy she'd missed a meal or two).

"Listen Bones," Booth said- he wouldn't normally share this kind of thing, but with his own partner's safety involved here, he thought it right to let her know-, "Sully… he lost his partner about… a year ago, all right? Something like that happens, you hear that clock on the inside ticking just a little bit louder. So you know what, you're in good hands."

He just wished that he didn't have to speak from personal experience on that topic; he might not have actually been reminded of his mortality by Doyle's death, considering that he'd been immortal at the time, but it had reinforced the risks he ran by working so closely with mortals, and then there'd been Cordelia's coma and Fred being taken by Illyria…

The sight of Wyatt approaching once more drew Booth's thoughts back to the present; he wasn't going to discuss those losses with anyone unless he had to.

"Here he comes," he said to his partner, "so gotta go, gotta go, gotta go."

As Wyatt walked up to Booth after he closed his cellphone, Booth sighed; after what had just happened, he felt that Wyatt deserved something more than what he'd been getting so far. "All right, so maybe I am a little bit irritable."

"Why do you think that might be?" Wyatt asked.

"Don't they give you papers, and files, and reports?" Booth asked, only to be met with a stare from Wyatt; clearly, this guy believed in the patients discussing what made them come here in the first place. "All right; me and my partner caught up to this serial killer named Howard Epps, and he died."

"And whose fault was that?" Wyatt asked, sitting on the edge of the garden table as Booth sat down in a nearby seat. "Yours or your partner's?"

"No, no, he jumped over that balcony…" Booth began, laughing slightly sarcastically. "Maybe 'cause of her. Sometimes I think he had the right idea."

"And where were you when Mr. Epps fell?" Wyatt asked.

"Holding his arm," Booth replied.

"No, that was before he fell, surely," Wyatt said.

"What?" Booth said, looking at the psychiatrist in confusion.

"Well," Wyatt clarified, "Mr. Epps was dangling from your arm before he fell, at which point he was no longer dangling but falling. Attached to you, he was alive, no longer attached, dead."

"I don't feel guilty about that," Booth said; he might have wanted the guy to go to prison, but he wasn't going to regret that a monster like that was burning in Hell. "I mean Epps is a serial killer, tried to kill my partner and threatened my son; I was glad when he hit that pavement."

"Do you think about suicide often?" Wyatt asked.

"Suicide?" Booth said with a scoff; he had no idea where that question had come from, but he wasn't going to take it seriously. "Me? No, no, never."

"And yet you sometimes feel that Howard Epps had the right idea about jumping off that balcony," Wyatt said.

"It was a joke, OK?" Booth said; even at his worst after his soul had been restored, he'd never give serious thought to suicide no matter how bad he'd felt, even if that had partly been because it would have seemed like the easy way out after everything he'd done. "It was a joke."

"Yes… you do that a lot, don't you?" Wyatt said, looking speculatively at him. "Makes me feel such a bully for prying…"

With that said, Wyatt stood up to go back inside, smiling at Booth as he handed the unsigned form back to him. "Well, we'll pick up on this next time."

Booth had no idea what was just meant to have happened, but he had a feeling he'd missed something important in their recent conversation and he didn't like it.

* * *

  
"You know what," Wyatt said, walking out into the yard as Booth worked on the barbeque pit, coffee cups in the psychiatrist's hands as Booth continued to set up the bricks for the pit, "I'm in America, we're men, let's drink coffee, not tea, eh?"

He paused to examine the pit, which now came up to between knee and waist-height. "Oh, I say, marvelous job."

"Thank you," Booth said, taking a sip of the coffee before wincing at the taste. "That's not coffee."

"What is it?" Wyatt asked.

"I don't know what the hell it is, but it sure as hell isn't coffee, Doc," Booth said firmly as he turned his attention back to making sure that the recently-laid brick was properly balanced; he'd tasted bad coffee when working with Cordelia in the early days of Angel Investigations, and while this might not be as bad as that coffee had been, it came pretty close according to his tastebuds (Which were more sensitive to the issue now that his physiology was adapted for something other than blood).

"You tend to do things well, don't you?" Wyatt said. "Make coffee, build barbecue machines."

"It's not really a machine," Booth corrected; it was probably another psychiatric 'test', but considering that he'd known about barbeques as a concept since he was human- they had cooked outside sometimes, after all-, he felt comfortable making that distinction.

"Solve crimes, raise a son, love women, leave women," Wyatt said. "Whatever you aim at, you hit."

"That bad?" Booth asked; he'd always been rather proud of his ability to come through in a crunch, which was why he'd taken it so personally when Groo had shown up and been so much better at everything than him…

"By no means, no of course not, except-" Wyatt said.

"Oh, it's OK, here we go," Booth said, as the two of them moved to sit at the patio table. "Let me have it, Doc."

"Except it is indicative of a need to control your environment," Wyatt said, looking reflectively at him.

"Again, I ask, is that bad?" Booth said, not looking at Wyatt as he asked the question.

"No, of course not, no!" Wyatt said. "Except-"

"Except?!" Booth asked, wishing the other man would get to the point.

"Except when you shoot a clown," Wyatt pointed out.

"You know," Booth said, resenting the phrasing of that last statement, "you make it sound like it was walking and making balloon animals."

"For the most part," Wyatt said, ignoring Booth's protest, "your rebellions are small."

"Rebellions?" Booth repeated sceptically; he couldn't think of any occasion he'd rebelled against his current role as Seeley Booth.

"The colourful socks, the funky belt buckle, they're a mechanism, quiet rebellions, a way of asserting your personal control over a homogenizing organization like the FBI," Wyatt clarified. "But shooting a clown is not a quiet rebellion. Shooting a clown is quite literally deafening."

"Booth," Booth said, answering his phone as it began to ring, grateful for the opportunity to get away from this new analysis; talking about control might bring up why he felt the need to _have_ control…

" _Hey, it's me_ ," Bones replied.

"Yeah, hold on for a second," Booth said, looking at Wyatt as he began to walk back into the house. "Wait, why is it, Doc, that every time I answer the phone, you walk away?"

"Why do you answer the phone knowing it'll make me walk away?" Wyatt replied.

There was nothing he could say to that statement without sounding petty, which prompted Booth to make a decision.

"Yeah," he said, his attention turning back to the phone in his hands, "you know what, Bones, I'm gonna have to call you back."

He wouldn't have done that normally, but his partner didn't sound like she was in any actual danger, so a lack of response wasn't going to hurt anything…

* * *

  
"Oh my good lord," Wyatt said, walking out to look at the completed barbeque pit as Booth stood up after connecting the gas line.

"That's right," Booth said, as he lit the barbeque, grinning at his accomplishment; in a small way, it was nice when he was able to create something rather than defining his life by his ability to kill things.

"How many bricks did you use in the end?" Wyatt asked.

"Yep, you know, one hundred and eighty," Booth said, before he produced the piece of paper once more. "Right, so you can sign away."

"What are those?" Wyatt asked, indicating the meat sitting next to the barbeque.

"Oh, those are two beautiful prime rib-eye steaks," Booth said with a smile. "Being the barbeque master that I am, I thought I'd show you how to barbeque, Doc."

"Oh, but I don't want to be shown," Wyatt said. "I want to learn trial and error."

"No, no, no," Booth said. "Doc, listen, it's better to learn off hamburgers, or sausages. You know those puppies cost fifty bucks a pop?"

"You know," Wyatt said, opening a folder that Booth hadn't realised he was holding, "according to the FBI reports there was no way you could save Epps' life. Your partner's report says the same thing. An FBI sniper from the opposite roof saw everything through his scope. According to all witnesses you have nothing to feel guilty about."

"Yeah, so?" Booth said, suddenly uncomfortable once more; he had a feeling that he knew what Wyatt was about to say, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to hear it…

"So why, in a fit of pique, did you endanger innocent people in a public thoroughfare by discharging your firearm?" Wyatt asked.

"I'm a good shot," Booth said as he closed the barbeque cover to look at the other man. "I didn't put anyone in danger."

"Your file shows you're a military sniper," Wyatt continued. "How many people have you killed?"

"Lost count," Booth said automatically; when people phrased a question like that, even with the knowledge that his Shanshu reflected how he had been forgiven, he just automatically found himself recalling the numerous faces dead because Angelus had been hungry…

"Oh, you can remember a hundred and eighty bricks, but not how many lives you've taken?" Wyatt said, looking probingly at Booth.

"Epps makes fifty," Booth said after a brief pause, making sure he had the numbers right; all he had to do was focus on the memories of the deaths that hadn't been the result of close-quarter contact, and it wasn't that hard to 'distinguish' between who he'd killed as Angelus and who he'd killed as Booth…

"Fifty what?" Wyatt asked.

"Fifty kills," Booth said.

"But, Agent Booth, you didn't kill Epps," Wyatt said automatically. "You tried to save him, remember? Or perhaps I'd better put it as a question; did Howard Epps slip from your grasp, or did you release him?"

That simple statement prompted Booth to reflect back to the moment when he had been holding on to Epps's hand over the balcony, struggling to hold on to it, the weight of the other man making it harder and harder for him to keep hold before he lost his grip, leaving Epps to hurtle towards the ground…

"Oh, come now man, it's a simple enough question," Wyatt said. "Was he indeed your fiftieth _kill_ , or did you just happen to be there when he died?"

"I don't know," Booth said after a few moments of thought, flustered at the question; he'd done everything he could to hold on to Epps, but without his old vampiric strength, there was only so much he could do to keep hold of the guy in that kind of position, particularly when Epps hadn't been that committed to staying alive…

"A man like you in control of every situation and you don't know?" Wyatt asked.

"I don't know," Booth repeated, shaking his head. "I had him, and then I lost him, and then something happened in between… I don't know."

"I believe you," Wyatt said, nodding solemnly at him after a moment's silence. "Because for a man like you to admit that you don't know, to relinquish control, that could indeed argue a… disruption in your self-view that was large enough to motivate you to shoot a clown."

As much as psychology made Booth uncomfortable, he had to admit that Wyatt had a point; after so long operating outside of his own control, with Angelus in the driver's seat and then plagued by his own vampiric instincts, loss of control would be hard for him to deal with, even if he wasn't consciously acknowledging it…

"You know, I think we've made marvelous progress," Wyatt said, as he sat down to sign the form at last. "This is a close where we can certainly begin."

For a moment, Wyatt's pen hovered over the form, before he looked at Booth with a smile. "You know what, I've changed my mind; I would love for you to cook those steaks."

"I can do that," Booth said, lost for anything else to say as he took the signed form from the psychiatrist.

"Medium-rare, please, Mr G-Man," Wyatt said.

"I can do that," Booth said again

Somehow, even this attempt to give him back some sense of control just wasn't as satisfying as it would have been earlier; it just felt slightly too much like Wyatt was humouring him after everything else that had gone down, rather than actually feeling like he'd been 'cured' of his earlier issues.

In the end, even if he hadn't killed Epps, he'd still failed to save the guy, and he couldn't even before sure if he'd done it on purpose or just because there was nothing for him to do…


	37. The Man in the Mansion

"You just don't get it," Booth said, leaning over his desk as he looked at Sully on the other side of it; he might consider the other agent a friend, but this whole situation was just so awkward he was suddenly more understanding of Xander and Gunn's use of humour in the past…

"What?" Sully said, shrugging expressively at him. "I'm asking for guy advice, you are a guy; what's not to get?"

"First of all," Booth said as he sat back down, "guys, they don't ask for advice. And secondly, I'm not going to help you get my partner into bed."

"Why not?" Sully said. "It's not like you want her."

 _Damn_.

Booth _really_ wished Sully hadn't said that; that simple phrase opened up so many cans of worms he wasn't sure _how_ he was meant to answer it without exploring crap even he wasn't sure about yet (Like why this whole conversation reminded him of a more polite version of some of his earlier confrontations with Spike after he'd walked in on Angelus and Drusilla having sex…)

"Unless… do you want her?" Sully asked, leaning forward slightly as he spoke.

"Nah," Booth said automatically; it was easier to go there than think about making _another_ relationship more complicated than it had to be; he _could_ be friends with attractive women without wanting them, hadn't his time with Fred, Willow, and now Angela and Bones proven that? "Come on, Bones is, you know, my partner."

"That is why you need psychiatric treatment," Sully said, clearly ignoring what he had said earlier as he stood up and looked at Booth with a broad grin. "Because you have the hots for your partner!"

"I'm not in psychiatric treatment, OK?" Booth corrected; this might be shying away from the issue, but he preferred that to facing such difficult questions right now. "It's an evaluation; big difference."

"I can tell that Brennan is the go slow type," Sully said- Booth wasn't sure at this point if he was being deliberately frustrating or just trying to divert the topic to something else as quickly as possible, "but you gotta help me out on how slow, because too slow is worse than not slow enough."

"Agent Booth," another agent said from the office doorway, giving Booth a welcome opportunity to focus his attention back on the case, even if the news that the missing kid was in the morgue already was _far_ from the kind of distraction he'd wanted…

* * *

  
"In point of fact, it is therapy," Doctor Wyatt said as they walked along the street towards the Royal Diner, the latest location chosen by Wyatt for a casual encounter; apparently the house was some kind of 'stage one' meeting place.

"What?" Booth said, looking at Wyatt in frustration. "No, no, it's not; it's an evaluation."

"No, I've already certified you as fit to carry a gun and go back to work," Wyatt said.

"OK, then why are we meeting?" Booth countered.

"Well, because you discharged your weapon at an ice cream truck," Wyatt said, as they crossed the street. "My provisional certification of your mental health only holds as long as you continue to meet with me."

"Great," Booth said; he _hated_ being this dependent on someone else's good will, given the unpleasant memories it evoked of his time trying to manipulate the Senior Partners and the Circle (Even if he wasn't required to kill anyone this time around). "For how long?"

"'Til I'm satisfied you won't start firing at confectioners again," Wyatt said. "What's your objection to therapy?"

"You know what, doc?" Booth said, falling back on the most obvious protest he could make at this point. "I am not the kind of guy who's got anything to hide."

"You know," Wyatt said, as he opened the door of the Royal Diner, "I often find that when people declare what they are not, it almost invariably turns out that that's precisely what they are."

"Great," Booth said (In a way, that statement from Doctor Wyatt was slightly comforting; so far he wasn't showing any sign that he'd guessed at what Booth was _really_ trying to hide about himself). "Then, you know what? No more declarations from me."

"You do know that what you just said is, in fact, the very avatar of a declaration," Wyatt pointed out, as they walked over to an empty table in the diner.

"Avatar, that's great," Booth said, before he beckoned at a nearby waitress over. "Can I get a cup of coffee, and a, uh…"

"Tea, please," Wyatt said, making a 'T' sign with his fingers

"Tea, yeah," Booth said, waiting for the waitress to walk away before looking at the physically older man. "Let me ask you a question, doc. Why is that every time you introduce yourself, you always say your name twice, huh? 'Hello, my name is Gordon, Gordon Wyatt'."

"Well, now you're simply lashing out, aren't you?" Wyatt said, showing no sign that he was offended by Booth's mocking imitation of his accent. "Why don't we talk about the case you're working on at the moment?"

"Why?" Booth asked, surprised at this new turn.

"Well, I am trained as a forensic psychiatrist," Wyatt said, his hands under his chin as he looked thoughtfully at Booth. "I might be able to help."

"OK, fine, great," Booth said, deciding that he might as well take the guy up on the offer and see what happened; a new opinion didn't hurt, after all. "I have a dead rich guy, works with at-risk youth, gets brutally murdered after confiscating a couple of pounds of heroin from one of his kids."

"It's interesting the first word you use to describe him is 'rich'," Wyatt said, pointing both index fingers at Booth.

"Second," Booth countered. "First description was 'dead'."

"Why do you think you have a problem with wealthy people?" Wyatt asked.

"This case is a perfect example," Booth replied (Part of it came from some of the things he'd seen working at Wolfram & Hart, dealing with people who thought that money could buy them a 'Get Out of Jail' card, but he wasn't going to get into that even if Wyatt knew the truth about him). "This guy, he makes up his own rules; what's that word that you used?"

"Entitled," Wyatt said.

"Yeah, entitled," Booth said. "That's what got him killed."

"Did this rich guy, by any chance, have a wife?" Wyatt asked.

"What, are we changing the subject now?" Booth said; this was a complete turn in the conversation as far as he could see.

"And does the rich guy's wife have a lover?" Wyatt continued.

"I just told you," Booth said, looking at the psychiatrist in frustration- did Wyatt honestly think he'd ignore other leads if he found them?-, "the murder has to do with the heroin. The boy the victim took the heroin from also turned up murdered."

"And is this boy from a modest background?" Wyatt asked.

"Doesn't get any modester," Booth said, reflecting briefly on Julio Diaz's sad end; the kid might not have had much, but now even the potential to be more was gone.

"So is there any chance that you would rather catch the boy's murderer, than the wealthy fellow's murderer, so you have decided that they're one and the same?" Wyatt asked. "Any chance that you've based this assumption purely on your bias against rich, entitled people?"

"You know what?" Booth said, humming thoughtfully for a moment to give the impression he was thinking about it before he said what he wanted to say right now. "I did the belt buckle, I did the tie, I did the socks… what else do you want from me?"

"What would you say if I told you that my name actually is Gordon Gordon Wyatt?" Wyatt said, after the two men had stared thoughtfully at each other. "That my first and middle names are the same?"

Booth had no idea what point Wyatt was trying to make at first, before a possible solution came to him; the guy was encouraging him to think about other ways to interpret things.

Under other circumstances, Booth would have found that amusing- he was an ex-vampire who'd been cursed with his soul and was now working for the FBI; if anyone had a unique perspective on things, it was him-, but the severity of the situation just left him preferring to think about things…

* * *

  
"Hey, Doc," Booth said, as he and Wyatt ate Chinese take-away in his office- Booth chose to take the relocation as a hopeful sign, considering that the office was definitely _his_ territory-, "what we're doing here, would that be considered therapy?"

"Absolutely," Wyatt said, putting down the box he was currently eating from and sitting back in his chair. "Especially since I'm about to inquire whether you've experienced any outbursts of temper since I requested you alter your dress code."

"Yeah," Booth said, targeting the main issue he was facing right now. "One of the Squints- Hodgins- decided the rules, they didn't apply to him. He got entitled and jeopardized my murder case."

"Ah," Wyatt said. "And you confronted him physically?"

"Physical confrontation; that's my main skill," Booth said, allowing a slight edge of self-deprecating humour into his tone; there was more to him than that, and Wyatt knew it- his record wasn't that of a guy who relied on violence to get what he wanted-, but the point still stood.

"'Entitled', you say," Wyatt said thoughtfully. "Is he a wealthy man?"

"Yeah," Booth said. "Like the guy who got killed."

"The murder victim… who tried to help a child and then died for it?" Wyatt said, looking probingly at Booth. "And your… uh… Squint?"

"Yeah, squint," Booth confirmed.

"Extraordinary," Wyatt said. "Your squint tried to help a friend. So they both endeavoured to do good."

"With no clue of the way things are," Booth said, grateful that nobody from his true past could see him acting like such a hypocrite; he'd done more extreme things to help friends in the past, but it wasn't the same when you had to go by the rules to stop the bad guys…

"The way things are as defined by… a working class lad from Pittsburg?" Wyatt said, looking at Booth in a more pointed manner.

"That's right," Booth said, already prepared with a statement that covered the facts of his lives without lying about them, as he put down his take-out box and looked at Wyatt, getting up to walk back to his seat behind the desk. "Pittsburg, where I'm from, all right? From the streets. Where you get a sense of how the world really is."

"Yes, I'm sure that's true," Wyatt said. "But has it occurred to you that without the distortion of reality provided by a privileged upbringing, there'd be no such thing as the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal, the Three Rivers Stadium, home of your beloved Steelers?"

"The Three Rivers Stadium was demolished in 2000," Booth said, before allowing himself to reflect on both some of Booth's memories of visiting there as a child and Angel's memories of watching games there when in his better moods. "But it was a great place, though, that Lambert …"

"No doubt," Wyatt said. "The point is, you rebel in your way, your friend rebels in his. We all of us have to overcome our upbringing, rich and poor alike."

Booth had to acknowledge that point; it wasn't like he hadn't moved on from _his_ background, considering how he'd started out as a drunken layabout in the mid-1700s and ended up an FBI agent in the twenty-first century…

"You know what?" Wyatt said, looking thoughtfully at him. "I'm going to ask you to go back to your bilious socks and your ostentatious ties, and your provocative belt buckles."

"What, you're saying that if I wear flashy socks, I'm going to forgive Hodgins?" Booth said, looking at Wyatt in confusion.

"Oh Lord, I'm not sure I'm that good," Wyatt said, chuckling as he stood up. "Well, perhaps I am…"

"Hey, Doc, Doc, Doc," Booth said, before the other man walked out the door, one of the other man's earlier statements confusing him. "Uh… why is it that the belt buckle is provocative?"

"Oh, it's a modern day codpiece," Wyatt said. "It forces the eye to the groin."

When phrased like that, Booth had no idea how to respond to what he'd just been told; what did that say about his reasons for wearing it?

* * *

  
"I don't understand how they could do that," Bones said, the squint squad sitting around various tables as she looked at where Caroline was talking to the lawyer on the opposite side of the current case.

"Who?" Zack asked.

"Lawyers," Bones said, indicating the couple in question.

"Do what?" Angela asked.

"Be all friendly," Bones.

"The only people lawyers like are other lawyers," Cam said.

"Well, they were married," Booth said, only for everyone else to turn to look at him form his position standing slightly away from the table. "Well, they have a daughter, second year at MIT."

"Does anyone else see the irony here?" Hodgins asked (Booth wondered how Hodgins would react if he'd known just how ironic it; the idea of Booth knowing something about peoples' social lives that nobody else did was _really_ bizarre) as he took a sip from his coffee.

"Listen up you people," Caroline said as she approached the table. "The verdict is gonna come down any minute. Maybe we'll win, maybe we'll lose. But this I do know. You people have got to get your sand together, do you hear me? Booth, and you scientist android brainiacs- you got something very special here, but you are losing it."

As Caroline looked at him, Booth felt uncomfortable about the stare she was giving him, but that attitude relaxed as she shifted her focus to the rest of the team. "Dropping serial killers off balconies, blabbing suspects names to vengeful fathers, cuttin' into heads before their times, getting' poisoned, getting' blown up because you go grabbing for things you shouldn't ought, taking photographs from frames, gettin' a perfectly good car smashed to bits for no good reason. Get it together! Start using your oversized heads. This is the real world."

Moments like this reminded Booth why he liked Caroline; she was the exact opposite of the lawyers he'd had to deal with/work with at Wolfram & Hart (Gunn didn't count because he'd only had the legal knowledge rather than the legal 'upbringing'; he'd known how to play the game, but he hadn't been raised on it), while also presenting a Cordelia-like directness about their problems.

That was life all over, he supposed; sometimes, even the most successful team needed an outsider to remind them that what they had was important…

"Now," Caroline said, her tone calmer as she indicated Hodgins, "I know bug man here handed in his resignation. My official Justice Department recommendation is the following: We win the case, he gets his job back. We lose, Booth shoots him."

"The jury's returned with a verdict," the baliff said, as he walked up to the table.

"OK," Caroline said, looking around at the team. "Let's go face the music."

In a strange way, as Booth got up to join the others, he had a sudden feeling that what was about to happen here would be about more than just the case…

* * *

  
Sitting casually in his partner's office, Booth smiled at the sight of Bones and Angela walking through the lab, talking casually with each other about something that was apparently prompting broad smiles from both women.

"…like to shower with the other guys because he diverges from the quantifiable morphological norm," Bones said as the two women walked through the door to Bones's office.

"What?" Booth said, his feet up on the desk. "What's that mean?"

"Stand out from a crowd," Bones said, as she walked back behind her desk.

"Do you have a nickname, Booth?" Angela asked inquiringly. "Something the other cops call you?"

"Why?" Booth asked, trying to sound more teasing than he felt (He didn't think he'd ever received a nickname, but he had to wonder what Angela would think if she heard that he'd once been known as 'Angel'). "What have you heard?"

"Congrats, Bren," Angela said, smiling at her before walking out of the office.

"Wow," Bones said, looking at Booth's feet on her desk. "Those socks, those are...amazing."

"That's right," Booth said, smiling back at her as he fiddled with his tie. "The socks, the tie, the belt buckle… all escape valves for my socioeconomic rage."

"I hate psychology," Bones said, as she studied the files in her hands.

"Oh, you know, they help me deal with the day-to-day irritations of dealing with people that are more privileged…" Booth said, smiling at her as he felt their routine return to normal…

"I slept with Sully last night," Bones said.

"Oh," Booth said, the return to normality shattered. "I thought you already, uh…"

"No," Bones said with a satisfied smile. "Last night."

"Ah," Booth said, getting his feet off the desk. "It's really none of my business."

"Except we're partners," Bones said.

"Yeah, there's that-" Booth said, stuck for anything else he could say that wouldn't amount to a criticism of his partner's social skills.

"And you… told me about your socks," Bones said (Once again, his partner's social ineptitude was showing through; there was a _significant_ difference between telling someone about your socks and talking about your sex life).

"Mmm," he said, still lost for anything else that could be said right now. "Sex, socks… pretty much the same word."

"Do we have a case, or are you just visiting?" Bones asked.

"Yeah, I'll fill you in on the way," Booth said; it wasn't the best excuse to come along right now, but it had been something. "It's messy; better get some protection."

"Let me get my gumboots," Bones said.

As Bones walked out of the office, Booth stood up and looked down at himself with a grim sigh as he examined his attire, suddenly stuck for anything else to say or think about.

Bones had slept with Sully…


	38. Bodies in the Book

"So," Booth said, as they walked through the marina to their latest body, boats all around them, "is it just me or is this, ya know, kinda weird?"

"What?" Bones asked.

"Well," Booth continued, "in your new book, they found a body at the marina, right?"

"You read my book?" Bones said.

"Of course," Booth said, before he focused on the relevant part of the current situation, indicating the boat just ahead of them. "Anyhow, a guy docking the boat saw something floating in the water, thought it was a dead fish, it ended up being a decomposed hand. The dive crew just located the rest of the body."

"I didn't think you'd have time to read my book," Bones said, apparently still stuck on that revelation.

"You have time to write it, I have time to read it," Booth said (He'd even given Fred's article a shot when she'd told them about it, even if he hadn't understood it, and that was before he remembered some of Cordelia's shows and auditions he'd been to back in the day). "Besides, you can't avoid the damned thing. Your book is everywhere."

"OK, bring it up," a diver said as they approached, resulting in a chain being pulled out of the water as the two investigators stood on the edge of the pier.

"Booth," Bones said.

"Yeah?" Booth said, looking over at her.

"Look," she said, indicating the moving chain in front of them.

"Wait," Booth said, looking over at one of the nearby FBI forensic agents as the reason for his partner's disquiet came to him. "Body on the anchor?"

"Yeah, tied to the chain," the forensic tech said. "Body's not tied with rope. The diver said they used-"

"Red tape," Bones said, looking at the body as it was raised from the marina, wrapped in red tape and badly decomposed, reduced to little more than skin tightly wrapped around the bone.

"How did you know?" the forensic tech asked.

"Because that's how I wrote it," Bones said, staring in silent horror at the body before them.

The nice thing about dealing with this situation was that at least Booth could be reasonably sure that he was only dealing with a human threat rather than a demonic one; there might be various demons and spells capable of making his partner experience these kind of fears, but at least on this occasion he was probably just dealing with an obsessive fan rather than a demon.

It might be dangerous, but it was still a human level of danger…

* * *

  
"This is a sketch based on tissue markers on the skull," Angela said, focusing her attention on the reconstruction currently displayed on her computer as various pieces of flesh were laid out over the skull.

"TCB's and lead we found in the collegian means the victims from the North end of the Chesapeake," Hodgins said, his voice low as he looked at Angela. "Probably outside Anapolis."

"Did you have to whisper that in my ear?" Angela asked, even if the smile on her face suggested that she didn't mind it.

"Just seemed right," Hodgins said, a grin on his own face as he spoke.

"OK," Booth said, leaning over to whisper in Angela's ear himself to try and get the artist back on track, "check the image against the DMV photos from Maryland."

As Angela began to search through the photos, he placed an arm around his partner's shoulder and took her off to the side, giving them a better sense of privacy for what he was about to ask.

"Bones…" he said, looking anxiously at her. "How ya holding up?"

"What do you mean?" Bones asked. "Fine."

"Ya know," Booth said, "something like this, it's understandable if you're upset."

"It's probably a coincidence," Bones.

"Hey," another voice said, Booth turning around to see Sully walking into the office. "How's it going?"

"What?" Bones said, her initial smile at Sully's presence quickly replaced with confusion. "What are you doing here?"

"Uh, yeah," Booth said; he didn't recall telling Sully about the case.

"Well," Sully said, "I heard we had a copy cat killer using your book as-"

"That hasn't been established," Bones corrected.

"Yeah, I got it covered here, Sully," Booth said; he could tolerate the guy's relationship with Bones- and why was it only _tolerate_?-, but if the guy started poking his head in to get involved with Booth's working relationship as well, he was _really_ going to start getting annoyed…

"Well, two hands are better than one, Booth," Sully said as the other agent turned to look at him.

"Well, last time I looked, I have two hands, see?" Booth said, holding up his hands; he'd already had to deal with Spike trying to be him, the last thing he needed was Sully trying the same thing (And how did he end up with that analogy?). "Thanks."

"Testosterone spill on aisle 4," Angela said, even as her fingers continued working at the keyboard.

"We don't' know that my book is the cause," Bones pointed out. "So far what we do know is-"

"Someone died exactly the way described in your book," Sully interjected (Booth hated to admit it, but he partly resented the way Sully was automatically acting as though it was obvious this tied in to Bones's book; someone could have just read the book and used it as a convenient way to dispose of a body). "Do you keep any of your old fan mail?"

"No," Bones said. "I don't read it. The publicist deals with all that."

"Yeah, I mean, why are you asking, Sully?" Booth said. "I'm in charge of this investigation."

"Well, Booth, I was a profiler for two years; I have a lot of experience with these cases," Sully said ( _And I don't_? Booth thought to himself in frustration, made all the worse because he couldn't voice that thought without sounding petty). "This could be someone showing what a big fan he is or someone trying to get close to her. Too close."

"I don't need to be protected…" Bones began.

"Yes, you do," Booth said, trying not to be too annoyed that Sully had said the same thing; at least they were in agreement on one point, even if he disliked the other agent's approach.

"Look," Sully said as he turned to look at Booth, "you still call the shots; I just think I'd be an asset to the team."

"OK, fine," Booth said, stuck for anything that he could say as a rejection that wouldn't come across as some degree of pathetic resentment at the other guy intruding on his 'territory'. "We send all the fan mail to Sully- in his office."

"Fine," Bones agreed. "I'll call Ellen."

"We could be dealing with a real sicko here," Sully said reflectively.

"Jim Lopata," Angela said, looking back at them. "Not the sicko, the sicko's victim."

Booth was just grateful when Angela announced the identity of the victim; at least that gave them something else to work on rather than forcing him to over-analyse what he was talking about with Sully when even he wasn't sure where he was going with this…

* * *

  
"She was supposed to be visiting a friend," Ashton Keller said as he sat in the FBI conference room, Booth looking contemplatively at the husband of their second victim as he looked at her photograph in the case file.

"And when she didn't return your phone call?" Booth asked, standing behind the other man; right now, this guy struck him as the kind of suspect more likely to confess if he felt less pressured to do so, which meant not making himself a physical presence.

"I just assumed…" Ashton said, pausing for a moment as though lost for words before he continued. "She was very independent. Still kinda wild. I mean, she was used to getting whatever she wanted."

"Like what?" Booth asked, looking curiously at him.

"Let's just say she wasn't the wifely type," Ashton said, still looking ahead of himself without turning to look at Booth. "And since she had all the money, she… she thought she could, uh, you know…"

"Do you know any of the men she might have been seeing?" Booth asked, trying to simultaneously spare Ashton saying what she had done in the past and asking him to get to the point.

"I didn't want to know," Ashton said. "I just wanted it to blow over. I loved her, and I know it sounds pathetic… but I just loved her."

"Forgive me, Mr. Keller," Booth said, wanting to get him on to another topic as he walked around the table to stand opposite where the other man was sitting, "but uh, you stand to inherit quite a lot of money, from your wife, don't you?"

"Yes, I do," Ashton said. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you suspect me, but I was out of town the night that Sadie disappeared, at a golf tournament."

"I'm gonna need the details," Booth said, as he pulled out a chair.

"Of course," Ashton said.

"Yeah," Booth said, as he sat down opposite the other man.

"Sadie meant everything to me, Agent Booth," Ashton said. "And I know she loved me. Whatever happened, she did. I know that."

It might have seemed slightly pathetic, but Booth could understand that well enough; his relationship with Buffy and Cordelia might have been slightly healthier in that he knew they wouldn't cheat on him, but he would have still done anything to be with them if it was possible for him to be with them…

* * *

  
"Wow," Oliver said as Bones sat down opposite him in the interrogation room, Booth and Sully silently watching from the observation room out of a lack of anything else to do. "It's like you dressed up just to see me again."

"I can assure you, Oliver, that- that's not the case," Bones said, looking back at him with a slightly apprehensive expression (Not that Booth could blame her; his own deranged 'fan' might have only really been dangerous to the people who relied on him to handle stuff that was out of his league, but this guy could have actually killed someone).

"But that's not what it feels like to me," Oliver said, smiling slightly at his partner in a manner that left Booth uncomfortably reminded of a non-homicidal Drusilla; that kind of pathetic devotion could be dangerous.

"Did you kill those people, Oliver?" Bones asked.

"I-I can't answer that yet; I wanna talk a while first," Oliver said, leaning forward over the table to continue talking to her. "The dead bodies, is it true? Did they really get eaten, like in the book?"

"Yes," Bones replied. "They did."

"I knew it!" Oliver said, grinning in a manner that nobody should grin when discussing a real death; Booth was reminded of the vampire 'fans' with no real idea what they were really like. "Some of the Brennanites were sceptical that the deaths were realistic, but I told them-"

"Did he say 'Brennanites'?" Booth asked, Bones making the same comment on the other side of the mirror.

"Murder mystery chat room members," Oliver said (Booth wondered what people who had talked about Angel on chatrooms had called themselves, but he wasn't going to bother looking). "See, all chat room members have to identify themselves with their favourite author. I'm a Brennanite- of course-, but there are also, uh, Patterstonians and Graftonadas."

"OK, Oliver, I understand," Bones said, evidently wanting to get the conversation back on track. "What did you tell them?"

"That you couldn't make those things up," Oliver said. "That everything you write is based in fact. It could really happen."

"Oliver, I want to talk about the murders," Bones said.

"You look… so beautiful," Oliver said, his tone becoming a lower, eager tone that would have been unnerving even if it wasn't coming from a murder suspect. "Maybe I could get a picture of us together…"

"The murders, Oliver," Bones interjected.

"I know you just dismiss me as another fan, but once you get to know me, you realize I'm an interesting man," Oliver said, reaching out to touch her cheek before the anthropologist pulled away.

"No touching, Oliver," she said, looking at his hand with obvious discomfort.

"OK, end of interview," Booth said.

"Seems like a good call," Sully said, joining Booth as they walked out of the observation area and into the main interrogation room, each of them clear on their current target.

"Let's go," Booth said, walking over to Oliver while Sully moved to stand beside Bones.

"No," Oliver said firmly, as though he was the only person who understood the current situation (Fanatics were always like that, Booth reflected; once you got that kind of fixated world-view, it took a lot to get rid of it). "We want to be alone."

"No, you blew your chance for that," Booth said, grabbing the warped fan's arm and hauling him out of the chair. "OK, you can sit in the cell 'til you're ready to talk."

"Wait, don't leave yet," Oliver said, reaching out towards Bones. "Not yet-"

His attempt to reach for the anthropologist were brought to a halt when she punched him sharply in the nose, sending him reeling back and falling to his knees, only stopping himself from hitting the ground as his elbows caught the table.

"OK," Booth said, wincing in automatic sympathy as Oliver clutched at his nose and moaned in pain.

"See?" Bones said, looking between the two agents. "I can take care of myself."

"Yeah, you better watch it, dude," Booth said to Sully under his breath.

"Oh my God," Oliver said, staring at his bloodstained hands as his nose continued to leak. "There's so much…"

As the fan collapsed at the sight of the blood, Booth wasn't sure if he should laugh or sigh; judging by his reaction to the blood produced by a broken nose, the guy was clearly too pathetic to have killed someone, but that took their best pre-existing suspect off the board with no ideas about where they might find a replacement.

* * *

  
"Tell ya something, all right?" Booth said as he sat with Bones in her office, reflecting on their latest case (In a warped way, he had to admire the originality of the method; three people with obvious motives to kill taking one of the other's intended victims so that the obvious suspects had an apparently perfect alibi). "Sales of your book are gonna sky rocket after this."

"The only problem is our ending is a lot better than the one I wrote in the book," Bones said.

"What, are you kidding me?" Booth said, glad for the opening for a more relaxed topic. "Kathy Reichs and the FBI guy in the back of the AMG?"

"The arrest," Bones corrected, after sharing a laugh with him at that memory.

"Oh yeah, there's that," Booth said, grinning at the memory of the relevant part in the book; the novel arrest had been a lot less dramatic…

"Sully," Bones said suddenly.

"Yeah, you know you really should apologize," Booth said. "I mean, you were really ragging on the guy. He seemed a little frail."

"Eh, I'm a lot stronger than I look," someone said from behind him, prompting Booth to glance around and realise that the other agent was standing in the door of Bones's office.

"Oh, you were-" Booth began, before he decided to just move on from that and stand up to greet his colleague. "Hey, Sul."

"Hey," Sully said, shrugging slightly as he looked at them. "So, congratulations. You guys make a great team."

"It's true," Booth said, looking contemplatively back at Bones as she returned his look. "So true."

"Thanks for your help," Bones added as she looked at Sully, leaving Booth suddenly feeling like he was the intruder despite having been here first.

"You know, I should run," he said, looking awkwardly at his partner, even as her attention remained focused on Sully. "Bones, ya know, I-I got stuff… see ya at work, Sul?"

"Yeah, I'll see you, man," Sully replied, leaving Booth to get up and walk out of the office, looking back to see Sully walking up to his partner with a vulnerable, uncertain expression on her face that a part of Booth had always thought only he would ever get to see…

" _I have someone in my life now. That I love. It's not what you and I had… It's very new. You know what makes it new? I trust him. I know him_."

This might not be the same situation- for one thing, he was still in his partner's life, he just wasn't as important to it now-, but the end result was the same; he just didn't feel _needed_ any more.

He barely even registered Hodgins talking to him about something as he looked at his partner and his friend kissing in her office; all he could think about was how, once again, the woman he… cared about… had chosen someone else over him…

Goddamnit, he'd achieved his Shanshu, was it asking too much for him to get the girl as well?

And when did he start thinking of _Bones_ as 'the girl'?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To anyone wondering, Booth's thoughts on his own 'fan' refers to a storyline in the novel 'Impressions', where Angel encountered a former photography student who witnessed him in action and subsequently started posing as Angel, dressing in a similar manner and taking in clients, only to prove woefully inadequate at dealing with larger-scale threats (As an example, he used a rifle to kill a demon living in a client's garden without really researching how to kill it so it wouldn't come back later) and doing it all just for the power trip rather than recognising what it really meant to _be_ Angel.


	39. The Boneless Bride in the River

Remembering the condition of the corpse they'd recovered that started off this latest investigation, Booth tried not to show his greater-than-normal discomfort; he might be mortal now, and far away from the supernatural world, but the memory of what Marcus Roscoe had done to so many others in the name of his own renewed youth wasn't something he liked to think about, even if he'd have to experience the age part of that equation again sooner or later…

"The victim was boiled and a number of incisions were made from the top of the skull, around her right ear and down her right side," Cam explained, indicating the relevant areas on a diagram on a computer screen. "Then from the left foot, along the outside of the body, to her left hip."

"Someone with medical training?" Bones asked.

"Definitely not," Cam said firmly. "An untrained hand, but a very sharp instrument."

"Boiled?" Booth asked, grateful at the news despite his disgust at the described scenario; at least this all suggested a human amateur rather than a demon sacrifice.

"The entire skeletal structure removed, then the skin was sewn back around the organs," Cam said, a slightly sick smile on her face.

"It doesn't fit any kind of ritual killing I've ever heard or read about," Bones noted, staring thoughtfully at the screen.

"The organs are damaged, due to the clumsy cutting, but everything's there," Cam said. "Except the brain and the eyes."

"Oh my God," Booth said, looking up at the ceiling as he sank down; the idea that someone had managed to do all this and then put the organs _back_ …

Just when he thought he'd seen the worst of humanity at Wolfram & Hart, cases like this came along; who _did_ something like that?

"It must have been difficult to remove all those smaller bones, like the phalanges," Bones noted.

"Well, it's all gone," Cam said grimly. "I didn't even find one bone."

"The algae in the trunk is Cyanobacteria called Microcystis aeruginosa," Hodgins said as he walked into the office. "The size of the...scum colony indicates eight days submersion… Doctor Brennan?" the entomologist said, pausing as he realised that Bones had started to walk out of the office. "Have I offended you in some way?"

"Doctor Saroyan said no bones, so you know what that means?" Bones said with a smile. "I'm back on vacation. No bones, no Bones."

With that, she turned to head out, only to stop and look back as something came to her. "I was the second 'bones'."

"Very witty," Cam said.

Booth _really_ hated the sight of his partner walking away so quickly; it might make him sound petty, but the idea that Bones was abandoning such a fascinating case for her current relationship just felt… _wrong_.

* * *

  
"I thought you said you couldn't make a face," Booth said, looking at Angela as she scanned through the Homeland Security Database on her office computer, a sketch on the other side of the screen suggesting at the template she was using for this search.

"Did you hear about Zack and Hodgins and the balloon in the head?" Angela asked.

"Yeah," Booth said; the idea of using a balloon to inflate the empty head sounded good as a theory, but it was also seriously warped at best in his view (Angelus might have enjoyed it under the right circumstances, but even he couldn't imagine what those would have been). "Was it as bad as it sounds?"

"Yes," Angela said grimly, turning her attention back to the screen. "The least I could do was try to get her a face, poor woman. So, a boat, hmm?"

"Oh, Sully?" Booth said, quickly realising what Angela was referring to; he might not want to think about too much, but that didn't mean he was completely ignorant of it. "Yeah… last month, he wanted to live in a tree house."

"He's like me," Angela said with a smile as she tapped a couple of buttons on the keyboard.

"Yeah…" Booth said, trailing off as he realised he didn't actually understand what Angela meant by that last statement. "Ya know, I don't see that."

"Well," Angela clarified, "he's not really made for all this murder and corpses and empty eye sockets crap. He's a romantic."

"Unlike me?" Booth asked, slightly hurt at the implication that Angela didn't think of him as a romantic; he might only consider her a friend, but the idea that she thought he was all about his job…

"No," Angela said, looking up at him. "You're a romantic of the narrow kind; you live to catch bad guys, Sully lives wide."

Booth was completely lost about how to feel about that; he'd never really thought of himself as any kind of romantic- except a hopeless one, due to circumstance-, but he definitely didn't think of himself as that focused on his work.

"Hey," Angela said, breaking off his potentially bleak train of thought, "I got a hit off the Homeland Security Database."

"Li Ling Fan," Booth read off the passport photograph that Angela had pulled up from her search, depicting a pale-skinned Chinese girl with long dark hair.

"Yeah, she's here on a fiancée visa from mainland China," Angela said.

"Well, the fingerprints, it's a match," Booth said, as the relevant image was displayed on the screen. "Print this up for me."

"Yeah, this is the victim," Angela said in confirmation.

"OK, I'll go visit her fiancée tomorrow," Booth said, picking up a photograph from the table as he headed for the door, before pausing to look back at the artist once more. "And I… I live wide too. Far and wide. Alright? There's nothing wider than Seeley Booth."

"OK then," Angela said with a smile. "My bad."

The idea that Angela thought he had nothing outside his job just made him feel uncomfortable; he'd had a broad general knowledge of the supernatural as a vampire, he'd had his literary interests, he'd had his drawing…

Did he really come across like that to others now?

* * *

  
"Sully brought the boat," Bones said as the two of them watched as the casket of their potential second 'victim' was exhumed, a digger working away at the ground (One thing Booth _definitely_ appreciated about his new life over his old one; he could request and receive heavy equipment for this kind of thing, rather than his team having to do it themselves).

"Yeah?" Booth said, grateful for this apparent return to normality; discussing someone buying a boat might be a strange thing to talk about in a graveyard, but it was strange in a 'normal' sense, rather than being a strange thing for Bones to bring up. "Next thing you know he'll be shipwrecked on some island talking to a volleyball."

"He's leaving for the Caribbean," Bones said.

"Really?" Booth said after taking a moment to process that, Bones nodding in response in a tearful manner; he and Sully might be casual acquaintances at best, but the guy had clearly come to mean a lot to Bones. "Look, I'm… I'm sorry, Bones. I-I know that the two of you were kinda hittin' it off-"

"He wants me to go with him," Bones said.

"Oh," Booth said, immediately lost for words once again. "Oh… yeah…"

"He-he says I should take a year off, a sabbatical," Bones elaborated. "He says it'll be fun."

"Yeah, it would be," Booth said with an awkward shrug; the advantage of working rather than having a destiny meant that they could at least take time off from their mission, even if it was still important.

"But you just said he'd be shipwrecked with a volleyball," Bones pointed out.

"Well, he's got you," Booth said, lost for anything better to say that his partner would understand. "He doesn't need the volleyball."

"You think I should go?" Bones asked.

There were so many ways that Booth could answer that question that he wasn't sure which one to pick at first- the automatic response that kept the team intact, or the statement that would be what he _should_ say as a partner and friend-, before he spoke.

"Yeah," he said reluctantly; he'd torn his heart out for the good of the woman he… cared about… before, so he could do it again; all that mattered was that she was happy. "Yeah, yeah… I mean, you know it's, uh, one year out of your life, huh? I mean a person's gotta… live wide… and this is kinda narrow…"

The sound of the excavator striking something with a crunch at least gave him something else to talk about.

"The coffin already?" he said.

"It can't be," Bones said, looking at the grave in confusion as they both walked up to the hole. "We're only two feet down."

"Oh, easy!" Booth said, looking indignantly at the excavator as it began to move back; the other guy might not have experience, but this was a difficult situation. "Careful!"

As the excavator shovel was removed from the coffin, Booth had no idea what to think when what appeared to be money came flying out of the holes in the coffin lid;

"Is this fake money?" he said, grabbing one of the notes to study it; it had Chinese symbols on it, but even after over a century since the Boxer Rebellion, he didn't think this was real Chinese currency…

He didn't need Bones to tell him that there was no body in the coffin to know that this case was just becoming even more complicated; they'd already found a boneless body, and now they didn't even know what had happened to this other corpse.

The only nice thing about a case being this complicated was that he wouldn't have to think too much about what his partner had just told him…

* * *

  
As he watched Sully's boat sailing away, Bones standing on the edge of the marina, Booth wasn't sure what he should be feeling about this.

It sucked that Bones was losing someone who'd come to mean so much to her, of course- he wasn't entirely sure what it said about Sully that he'd named his boat after Bones; that felt like a serious bit of emotional manipulation to him-, but at the same time, a part of him couldn't help but grin; someone had finally chose _him_ …

"What are you doing here?" Bones asked, turning around to look at him, drawing his attention back to the present and away from speculation.

"I'm waving goodbye," Booth said, holding up his hand and waving at the disappearing boat; he wasn't about to admit to what really prompted this visit when he was still working on it. "See?"

"What do you want?" Bones asked, clearly not entirely fooled by his admittedly weak explanation.

"Breakfast," Booth said, trying to sound encouraging as his partner walked past him with a grim expression.

"I'm not hungry," Bones said.

"Oh, come on, huh?" Booth said, grinning as he manoeuvred around behind her to place an arm on her shoulder while he continued walking. "What are ya gonna vomit when we come across one of those, uh, horrific cases?"

"I don't vomit," Bones said firmly.

"Give it time, Bones, OK?" Booth said. "Give it time. Everything happens eventually."

"Everything?" Bones said, a thoughtful smile on her face at that statement.

"All the stuff, OK, that you think never happens… it happens," Booth said. "You just gotta be ready for it."

As the two walked up the dock, Booth was lost in thought at the deeper meanings behind that statement.

Would he ever have the chance to tell Bones just how incredible the world could be?

She might have just become the first person to choose him when faced with a choice- even if he was trying not to think of it _that_ way-, but did that mean that she was capable of coping with everything he'd have to tell her…?


	40. The Priest in the Churchyard

"You know, the priest made a complaint," Booth said, walking up behind his partner as they stood in the lab, Bones examining what looked like a rib. "He said that you made fun of consecrated grounds?"

"No I didn't," Bones said, still studying the rib. "Perhaps I was a bit… colourful."

"Colourful?" Booth repeated; knowing Bones, her definition of 'colourful' would be hideously awkward for anyone else.

"Writerly," Bones explained as she put the rib down. "I'm a best-selling author, Booth."

"The victim is thirty to forty years old," Zack said from the other side of the table, where he was studying what appeared to be a leg-bone.

"He's an old-school priest, Bones," Booth pointed out; Zack's comment could wait for a response, but Bones needed to hear what he had to say right now.

"What, so I'm supposed to walk on eggshells because someone believes that a plot of earth has supernatural properties because they waved a wand over it?" Bones asked, turning to face him as she waved a smaller bone in his face.

"It's not a wand, it's a…" Booth began, stuck for the best way to explain this. "The church doesn't use wands…"

"Fine, magic water," Bones said dismissively.

"Magic?" Booth repeated. "It's _holy_ water."

"The terminology makes it real?" Bones asked.

"OK, you know what?" Booth said, increasingly exasperated with his partner's approach to the topics that had so defined his life once upon a time. "I can't work with you on this case."

"What-what do you mean?" Bones asked, looking at him in surprise. "The victim was clearly murdered; we investigate murders, together."

"There's evidence of blood pooling on the frontal bone, and an absence of concentric fractures," Zack said, looking at what seemed to be a fragment of the skull. "That requires investigation."

"I'm not working the whole case with you attacking my beliefs," Booth said (He might have doubts about religion from his time as Angel, but he knew that holy rituals worked, so he at least knew that there was _something_ out there). "You should have just sailed off with your boyfriend."

"Funny," Bones said, studying another bone as she spoke, "a man who believes in an invisible super-being wants to run my personal life."

"Death would have followed quickly, caused by cranio-cerebral trauma," Zack said.

"By the way," Booth countered, as Bones looked up at Zack, "ninety percent of the world believes in God."

"And at one time, most people were certain that the sun revolved around the earth," Bones said as she turned to face him.

"You see what I mean?" Booth said. "I don't think this is about religion at all; we obviously have issues, OK, that are affecting our working relationship, and you're afraid to deal with them, so you just lash out at my religion."

"Can't you just be satisfied that if I'm wrong about God, I'll burn in hell?" Bones asked, still studying the bones.

"It's tempting," Booth said (He wasn't going to touch that issue, since he was fairly sure that whatever higher power existed didn't allocate you to the afterlife based on what you believed in, but he couldn't exactly share that information with Bones without getting into a more elaborate debate relying on stuff he _really_ couldn't share).

"Good," Bones said. "How about we get back to work? You know, I think we both still want to find out who killed this man."

That part of the current situation was at least something that he could agree on; whatever else changed about his job, whether he was fighting demons or tracking down murderers, he would always be someone who didn't want anyone to get away with murder.

* * *

  
"Shouldn't Brennan be here with you instead of me?" Angela asked as the two of them sat in the church, listening to Father Matt's sermon as the rest of the congregation leant forward in prayer.

"We're dealing with a few work issues," Booth noted, keeping his voice low.

"Trouble in paradise?" Angela asked with a slight smile.

"Just spending some time apart," Booth responded; he liked Angela, but he really wasn't going to touch that issue if he didn't have to. "Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to pray. Thank you."

"Did you two sleep together?" Angela asked, leaning over with a teasing tone to her voice.

"Do you see where we are?" Booth replied. "You don't talk like that in church."

"OK," Angela said, sitting back in her seat. "I…"

"What does that lab do to you people?" Booth said, urgently shushing her before she could say anything else; he hadn't encountered this kind of tactlessness since dealing with Cordelia back in Sunnydale.

"It's just that…" Angela said, pausing for a moment before she continued speaking. "This feels like a couple's thing, and now that Sully is gone…"

"It's not," Booth said. "It's a work thing. So is us being here, so stay focused."

As Father Matt ended his service and turned his attention to asking his parishioners about the current investigation, Booth had never been more grateful for his more official status; it was unlikely he would have managed to make this kind of impression on someone when he was only a private investigator, and his time as Wolfram & Hart had required him to be more removed from the people to maintain his new role. This method of identifying the victim might be comparatively basic, but it was still something that they could only use because of his official connections…

That said, he was still relieved when his and Angela's efforts allowed them to identify the murder victim as a Father McCourt; the earlier conversation had been awkward, but at least now they had more to go on than a face…

* * *

  
"Yeah…" Booth said, looking around the Medico-Legal Lab as Doctor Wyatt studied some of the bones on the examination table behind him. "You know, I got no problem with this place. It's where Bones and the Squints get their answers. See?"

"Thumbs in the belt," Wyatt said, hands behind his back as he looked at Booth. "That's a very aggressive stance… very male."

Put off by the comment, Booth folded his arms, only for Wyatt to comment on the defensiveness of the posture, leaving Booth to put his hands in his pockets out of a lack of anything else to do.

"Disdain," Wyatt noted, before waving his hands dismissively. "But let's not worry about what you do with your hands. What you must do is recognize your negative feelings for what is, after all, Dr Brennan's domain, and verbalize them."

"Verbalise them?" Booth repeated. "What, now?"

As Wyatt nodded in confirmation, Booth turned to study his surroundings for a moment, lost in thought about his current environment, before he responded. "This place is too… it's too shiny. It's bright. It's clean."

"Clean is bad?" Wyatt asked.

"Death isn't clean," Booth clarified. "Especially murder, which is our business. This place is completely… _fake_ , it's bogus."

"You'd like to destroy the entire edifice?" Wyatt asked.

"Oh, I'd like to rip the whole edifice down with my bare hands or set it on fire," Booth said, gritting his teeth as he allowed his thoughts to come spilling out; he'd spent so long working out of older buildings that he still didn't feel entirely comfortable with more modern technology and constructions. "Except, you know, there's nothing in this place to burn... all the plastic and the metal and the flashing lights, you know, and the arithmetic. I mean, where is a guy, a normal guy who believes in intuition and the soul and good and evil…"

"And God?" Wyatt asked.

"Yes, and God too," Booth said (It was a neat catch-all expression for higher powers, so he could say that he believed in a God even if it wasn't the traditional God). "Where is a guy who doesn't believe in all this _arithmetic_ supposed to stand?"

"So your problem with Doctor Brennan is that you don't know what will or will not catch fire, or where you stand," Wyatt said.

"What?" Booth said, lost for how he could really respond to that statement.

"That's good," Wyatt said, smiling thoughtfully at him. "Now that's… that's very good."

* * *

  
"We need to know what artefacts were buried with Bishop Jersik," Bones said, as they stood in the church talking with Lorraine, the parish administrator.

"You see," Booth said, holding a box of candles as Lorraine set them up at an altar, "there was no photograph of his burial in the paperwork that we received."

"Well, I'm not allowed to pull interment records with Father Donlan's permission," Lorraine began, before looking up as Bones walked along the aisle to another seat. "Where is she going?"

"Bones!" Booth said, noticing where his partner was walking. "You are approaching the altar- very sensitive area!"

"Right," Bones said, her voice low as she nodded in acknowledgement of his statement before she continued walking.

"Listen," Booth said, turning to Lorraine, "you must have known Father McCourt pretty well. Did him and Father Matt have similar tastes?"

"Look," Lorraine said, "the only similarity I know of is that they were from the same seminary."

"Same seminary?" Booth repeated.

"Look, Agent Booth, there's so much suspicion and innuendo these days," Lorraine said, looking at him in a quiet but firm manner. "This is a good parish. The Father makes sure of that."

"What's that?" Bones asked, Booth turning to see her pointing at the silver cup taking pride of place on the altar.

"It's the chalice!" Lorraine said firmly.

"Oh no, it's the vessel in which the wine is transformed into the blood of Christ..." Booth began, hurrying up to his partner; he might be past the point where holy relics could hurt him any more, but a century and a half of shying away from them sometimes translated into a brief concern that the holier artefacts could still be dangerous to people he cared about. "Don't touch it, no…!"

"It is going to be touched, Booth," Bones said, pointing firmly at the chalice. "It's silver, and these little eagles are a common Napoleonic motif."

"You're saying that it's possible that this could be, uh, a murder weapon?" Booth asked, walking up to stand beside Bones as he examined the chalice more closely; conversely, while holy artefacts hurting him was something he'd grown used to, he wasn't as used to thinking of them as offensive rather than defensive objects.

"Yeah," Bones said, looking over at Lorraine. "Can we take this with us, or do we need to serve a warrant on God?"

It might be a spiritually awkward object to confiscate, but with this discovery and Doctor Wyatt's help, Booth was actually starting to have faith that they'd crack this case sooner rather than later and repair their dynamic into the bargain…


	41. The Killer in the Concrete

"I think our victim was killed by Ice Pick," Booth said, holding up a photograph of the victim while leaving the potential killer's picture on the other side of a notepad with the nicknames written down (He wasn't sure if it was him becoming human or what, but he actually rather liked making up names for the suspects like this; he could actually understand how Xander had come to enjoy that kind of thing). "Angela did a facial reconstruction of Cement Head."

"'Concrete Head', you mean," Bones said.

"No, 'Cement Head'; it's got a nicer ring," Booth repeated, passing the relevant folder to his partner. "So I ran it through Interplus and I got a match."

"William Raymond 'Billy Ray' McKenna, West Virginia," Bones read from the criminal's profile. "Assault, manslaughter, kidnapping, torture."

"This here?" Booth said, picking up the other picture. "This here is, uh, Hugh Kennedy. Uh, I think he killed Cement Head."

"Why?" Bones asked.

"Well," Booth explained casually, moving some of the folders aside to find the relevant photograph, "West Virginia, likes to use ice picks on his victims, plus Ice Pick and Cement Head were both employed by a regional crime boss from West Virginia named Gallagher."

"Well, what are we going to call him?" Bones asked.

"Gallagher," Booth said simply; the nickname angle appealed, but there was no point using it when they knew who they were talking about. "What?"

Deciding not to bother explaining the intricacies of nicknames to Bones at this time, he turned his attention back to his explanation. "He runs most of the, uh, prostitutes, strippers, gambling, bootlegging, meth, extortion in West Virginia."

"Five years ago," Bones said as she studied the file, "the West Virginia state police began pressuring Gallagher's criminal operation, making a lot of arrests."

"Including Ice Pick and Cement Head," Booth said, indicating the notepad with a smile. "Cement Head goes to jail. Ice Pick? Out on bail, babe."

"You say that like it means something," Bones said.

"Well," Booth said, "I talked to the officer in charge and he said that Ice Pick wouldn't say anything, so they punished him by letting him out on bail."

"How is bail punishment?" Bones asked, clearly confused at that decision.

"'Cause it makes Gallagher think that Ice Pick cooperated with the cops," Booth clarified; that was one of the rules that was easy enough to understand with his background, whether it was dealing with his memories of his time as an affiliated agent of the Order of Aurelius or his law enforcement training. "Ah, it's criminal psychology, Bones, you know, you wouldn't get it. Just… read. Just continue reading there, will ya?"

"Half a million dollar bond," Bones said as she continued reading. "Kennedy jumped bail. Hmm, killed in a car accident while fleeing a… 'bail fugitive recovery agent'."

"Bounty hunter," Booth clarified, noting his partner's confusion at that statement.

"Car burned the remains to ashes," Bones finished.

"All they got was a severed leg," Booth said. "They didn't actually get Ice Pick's body."

"So we going to talk to the bounty hunter?" Bones asked.

"No, I am," Booth said, moving the files around on his table. "You're gonna make sure that the severed leg actually belongs to Ice Pick."

"Someone kept the leg?" Bones asked.

"The severed leg was frozen as evidence," Booth clarified (Not that he couldn't understand her point; keeping a leg in good enough condition this long after the original crime had been committed was weird under most circumstances, but with limited available evidence the decision had made sense at the time).

"So… you think Ice Pick might still be alive?" Bones asked.

"As a friend of mine likes to say, 'don't jump to conclusions until all the evidence is in'," Booth said, getting up from his desk with the file in his hand.

"But if the facts are in, then it's not jumping to conclusions," Bones pointed out. "So I never said that."

"I never said that the friend is you, OK?" Booth said as he walked out of the office, smiling at the memory of the recent conversion; it was nice that, even after over a year working together, he and Bones could still surprise each other…

* * *

  
Sitting in the Royal Diner as he read the paper, trying to eat the relatively tasteless oatmeal he'd ordered out of a lack of anything else he particularly wanted to chew on right now, Booth was surprised when a young woman walked in and sat down opposite him, with short dark hair, wearing a black leather jacket, and something in her manner that immediately put him in mind of Faith before she'd fought him in Los Angeles.

"I'm the bounty hunter you want to talk to; Veleska Miller," the woman said, throwing her badge on the table and taking Booth's coffee before he'd said anything. "You want to know about Kennedy's leg?"

"Anything you want to tell me outside the official report, that's great," Booth said, keeping his reaction casual.

"Sure," Veleska said, a slight sneer to her voice as she spoke. "How it smelled, his body cooking over the fire. Otherwise, I stand by the record."

"How'd you find him?" Booth said; he'd been around enough burning bodies to know the scents she described, and he didn't need to think of any more.

"Tip from someone I know who provides documents from fugitives," Veleska said. "Tailed him. He made me, took off. Boom. Found his leg about thirty yards from the vehicle."

"And you saw him burn?" Booth asked.

"Yeah; why?" Veleska asked, only for Booth to pick up the paper and start to read it again; he'd seen enough from this kind of woman over the centuries to know that he wasn't going to get any more out of her after that kind of statement. "That's it?"

"That's it," Booth said, turning his attention back to his paper.

"I'm a little disappointed," Veleska said, smiling at him in a manner that again reminded him of an early Faith. "I was hoping you'd keep me here a while, ask me some dumb ass federal questions, check me out."

"How's about I buy you a nice breakfast then?" Booth said, smiling slightly at her in a manner that would leave

"A guy like you must be going crazy in the FBI," Veleska said, smiling at him.

"What kind of guy is that exactly?" Booth asked, briefly wondering if she was talking about his vampire history or something else.

"I'm a bounty hunter, sport," Veleska replied, leaning over the tbale. "I read people fast or I die. You are not standard government issue. Take a walk on the wild side. I have more fun, fewer rules and a lotta money."

Booth had to admit, if he hadn't had experience at covering up his reaction to anything that came close to revealing the truth about his life as Angel, that comment might have unnerved him with how well she'd read him.

As it was, it was just something to note about this woman and move on; he'd spent time working outside the legal system, dealing with the cases they just wouldn't be qualified to handle, and now he was paying his dues within the system and with a broader range of connections and resources.

"You know," he said, deciding to give as vague an answer as possible as he leaned over the table himself, "you make a compelling case."

The sound of his phone ringing gave him a welcome excuse to focus on something else, leaving him to turn his attention off the current conversation and focus on something he probably knew how to handle. "Booth."

" _Coroner's report said Kennedy's leg was severed in the car accident_ ," Cam's voice said.

" _We don't call him Kennedy; we call him 'Ice Pick'_ ," Bones added.

"Hold on for one second; sorry," Booth said apologetically to Veleska before moving over to the counter to talk slightly away from the woman in question; even without her insight into him, this wasn't something he was comfortable talking about in front of her. "Yeah, ah, listen, I got the, uh, bounty hunter here. She was an eyewitness to the crash, saw him incinerated."

" _Tell Booth that Ice Pick's femur is sliced cleanly at ninety degrees_ ," Bones said.

"I can hear you, Bones, OK; it's a speaker phone," Booth said, before continuing the conversation to focus it back on the case. "Look, amputation like that could happen in a bad wreck, right, Cam?"

" _Yes_ ," Cam said.

" _There are kerf marks_ ," Bones put in.

" _She's seeing evidence of a saw, Booth_ ," Cam clarified.

"I know what kerf marks are," Booth said (Particularly on human bodies; Angelus had used the occasional saw on his victims, even if he didn't like to remember it).

" _Booth should arrest the bounty hunter_ ," Bones put in.

"I can hear you, Bones," Booth said (How someone that smart could feel the need to repeat herself that often made him wonder at times). "What am I gonna arrest her for, huh?"

" _For lying, for perjury, and for aiding in a cover-up_ ," Bones said.

" _If she's there with you, just detain her_ ," Bones said, even as Booth turned around to see Veleska having left the diner and a red car driving away, the bounty hunter in question giving him a brief wave from the driver's seat as she passed the window.

"OK," he said, already cursing the additional problem he was now facing in finding his suspect, "I'll let you know how that works out."

* * *

  
"You know," Booth said, as he followed Bones towards her office, the discussion over the amputated leg pushed aside for the moment, "I was going through your father's criminal-"

"Shhh!" Bones hissed, looking urgently at him.

"Criminal record," Booth said, lowering his voice accordingly, "and he was right about one thing, alright; he never ended anyone's life who didn't have it comin' to 'em."

It wasn't a great distinction to make, he knew- he'd tried to act like that when he'd regained his soul and he couldn't even make that work in the end-, but it was a point he felt Bones should keep in mind.

"He's a sociopath," Bones said, shrugging as though the victims' identities didn't matter.

"Well, maybe, but at least he aimed in the right direction," Booth said, wincing as he clutched at his aching jaw; toothache was one thing he _definitely_ hated about being human, considering that his vampire teeth had always pretty much taken care of themselves (Blood wasn't exactly a major cause of tooth decay and his teeth shape-shifting when he went vamp face had cleared up any damage he might sustain anyway).

"Let me just take a look at your tooth," Bones said, putting down the file she'd been carrying to look at him.

"Alright, just… go easy," Booth said, putting down his own file as he stood in front of his partner. "You promise?"

"OK," Bones said, reaching out towards him.

"Alright?" Booth said.

"Open up," Bones said, placing her hands on his face to examine his tooth, Booth trying to continue his earlier talk even as he kept his mouth open.

"What?" Bones said as she released her grip on his face.

"In the Old West, he would have been considered a hero," Booth repeated (He could think of a few places in the present that would be prepared to look the other way if these crimes occurred on a smaller scale, but this wasn't the time or the place to talk about that).

"Yeah, well," Bones said, grabbing his face again and pushing down his jaw, ignoring his yelps of pain, "the Old West was a time of chaos and violence that, anthropologically speaking, our country it still trying to recover from… yeah. I was right. Anterior molar on the left side; it's infected."

"You know," Booth said, wincing in pain as Bones walked away from him to sit behind his desk, trying to take his mind off his discomfort by focusing on what he was saying to his partner, "your father never killed any hard working, tax paying citizens or honest cops."

"You still think that society should forgive him?" Bones asked, looking inquiringly at him.

"Well, I'm saying, if I have the opportunity to arrest him, I will," Booth said; whatever else he liked about his position, there were rules he would have trouble bending. "But you know who maybe should forgive him? His daughter."

The ringing of his cell phone might mean that he wouldn't be able to continue this conversation right now, but he was actually grateful for that; he _really_ needed some time to think about how he could argue in Max's defence without ending up talking about himself and his past as Angel…

* * *

  
"Why didn't you just tell them about Kennedy?" Bones asked, as the two of them sat in the Royal Diner, Booth's injuries from his recent torture experience having been treated in the hospital; he might still be in pain, but it was nothing he couldn't cope with.

"Well, ya know, I needed to give you time to find me," Booth said nonchalantly. "Ah, I've been tortured worse."

Bones would never know just what kind of pain he'd had to endure in the past; his military memories had a few unpleasant experiences, but naturally nothing compared to his time in Hell…

"So," he said, looking thoughtfully at his partner as his mind seized on a topic to distract them from that particular issue, "you hear anything from your old man?"

Without replying, Bones took out a letter and a glass dolphin and placed them on the table, Booth reaching out to pick up the dolphin as he remembered what she'd told him about her mother's interest in the mammals in question.

"He left my car in the garage," Bones said, as he picked up the letter and looked over it. It was a simple few lines- ' _Honey, Next time I_ _really_ _want to tell you some things about your mother. Love, Dad_ '-, but that was still more than he'd ever received from his own father when he was alive.

That was one of the best examples of how weird and completed life could be even without the supernatural; the well-intentioned but frustrated father who'd always wanted the best for his son was the pain in the neck, and the killer who'd abandoned his daughter without any explanation was a better man than the other could have ever been…

"He'll be back," he said, folding the letter back up and putting it down.

"How do you know?" Bones asked.

"Max Keenan does not strike me as the kind of guy who… leaves things undone," Booth replied, out of a lack of a better way to phrase it.

"Next time he shows up, what do I do?" Bones asked. "Do I call you? Do I knock him on the head? What's my obligation?"

"Well," Booth said, studying the glass dolphin, "if I were you, Bones, I'd wanna know what he has to tell you about your mother, but, uh, that's just me."

He could tell Bones what he thought she could do, but ultimately, this was her decision; his relationship with his father in either memory wasn't in the right kind of place for him to feel comfortable clarifying his reasons for that kind of support himself.

"There's, uh, this old song," Bones said, after a moment's awkward silence. "It's called 'Keep on Trying'."

"Yeah," Booth said, smiling at the memory. "Poco."

"You know it?" Bones asked.

As Booth started singing it, he wondered what the relevance of this song had to what they were discussing earlier, but, but that thought was easy enough to push aside; right now, the memories it helped his partner think of were obviously good ones, and that was all that mattered.


	42. Spaceman in the Crater

"The crows and critters sure made quick work of him," Cam said, as the squints studied their latest body on the lab table, the remains so spread out that Booth was reminded of a more graphic cartoon than an actual body.

"Yeah," Hodgins said, picking something out of the pile of pulverised human remains, "but these Calliphora vicina eggs will confirm time of landing."

"Blowflies on aliens," Booth said with a grin. "Who knew?"

"You're taking a show at me because I happen to believe that we are not all alone in an infinity of space?" Hodgins asked, looking critically at him.

"It's not the believing in extraterrestrial life that's odd…" Bones said.

"It's the believing that they're visiting us," Booth clarified (He'd heard a couple of stories about that demon that had been summoned from space to drain Sunnydale's mentally-damaged population during that whole mess with Glory, but that wasn't exactly proof of alien life).

"This guy is wearing loafers," Hodgins said indignantly. "Aliens don't wear loafers, people."

"Even if they want to pass unnoticed amongst us?" Cam asked teasingly.

"Before taking us over?" Booth added; alien conspiracies might be ridiculous, but it was kind of fun to tease Hodgins about it.

"Oh," Hodgins said. "Oh, this is harassment. You know, it's illegal to mock people for their fundamental beliefs."

"Is the tissue damage consistent with a long fall?" Bones asked, as Zack walked up to join them , activating a monitor

"Definitely," Cam said.

"You've seen something like this before?" Zack asked, looking curiously at her.

"Suicide off the Chrysler Building," Cam said. "At least this one didn't hit the pavement."

"A human being reaches terminal velocity after falling two hundred to two hundred and twenty meters depending upon air resistance," Zack said. "Velocity would be achieved between five and eight seconds depending upon atmospheric conditions, body position and clothing. He fell from a minimum of twelve thousand feet. I can run through the math if you'd like."

"Send me an e-mail," Booth said- killing people from a great height was one means of death he'd never tried as Angelus as he was never anywhere with buildings that were tall enough to make it interesting, so he was quite happy to remain as relatively ignorant as he could-, as Bones examined a nearby computer screen showing X-rays of the bones.

"This is…" she said, looking thoughtfully at the bones. "I want to say 'anomalous', but I'm going to go with 'weird'."

"What's weird?" Cam asked.

"These areas of radial lucency here and here," Bones explained, indicating sections of the X-ray around the joint.

"Extremely porous bones," Zack noted.

"What's that mean?" Booth asked.

"That means he was ill," Cam said.

"His right femoral head shows significant demineralization," Bones said, indicating another bone. "Zack?"

"I'd put him at a hundred and thirty," Zack said.

"Hundred and thirty what?" Booth asked.

"Years," Bones said.

"Old?" Cam asked, looking at her in surprise.

"There's an alternate explanation," Bones said (Something that Booth was glad for; the bones being clearly human pretty much eliminated the idea that this was a demon, and no vampire was capable of leaving bones after only a century).

"Then that's the one we should go with," Cam said.

"He was in outer space," Zack clarified.

"So he fell from outer space in a pair of loafers?" Booth asked, exaggerating his amusement at the idea; he might not be the science guy, but while he didn't doubt the squints' abilities, he was fairly sure loafers weren't something astronauts wore when they were in action.

"Hodgins left too soon," Cam said, thoughtfully studying the remains.

* * *

  
"If someone simply pushed him out of the plane, there might not be any evidence," Bones noted, as the two of them watched the FBI agents searching through the airplane hanger holding the victim's plane. "We have to hope there was a struggle."

"Excuse me," a woman said, walking up to them with a firm glare. "Can I see some ID, please?"

"Well, yeah, sure," Booth said, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours…"

The woman's firm stare made it clear that she wasn't in the mood for jokes, so Booth abandoned that attempt and pulled out his ID card. "Right; here you go."

"That airplane belongs to the agency," the woman said, after a brief glance at his card.

"Our information is that it belongs to Colonel Calvin Howard," Bones pointed out.

"The agency leased it to him," the woman said.

"Well it's being investigated as a possible crime scene," Booth said. "You were Colonel Howard's boss?"

"Yes," the woman said. "Nina Sanborn; I carry a rank equivalent to an Air Force general."

"Why didn't you report him missing, General Sanborn?" Booth asked, giving her a mock salute.

"Equivalent, I said; I'm a civilian," Sanborn corrected him. "Cal was- Colonel Howard wasn't missing. He was barely gone a day."

"You know, General Sanbron," Booth said, deciding not to respond to that particular statement directly, "I know you people are really tight-lipped, but I'm really good friends with a very aggressive federal prosecutor who's great at getting warrants."

"Agent Booth?" one of the forensic techs said. "I got the usual fibres; hair, particulates."

"No blood?" Bones said. "No sign of a struggle?"

"Nothing," the tech said apologetically. "You'll have my full report by the end of the day."

"Great," Booth said, turning back to Sanborn. "OK; I need to know what Colonel Howard was working on at the time of his death."

"Get your warrant, Agent Booth," Sanborn said firmly. "Doctor Brennan."

"Hey," Booth said, reaching into his pocket as Sanborn began to walk away. "'Equivalent to a general' Sabron?"

As she turned to look at him, Booth smiled as he held up the paper that Caroline had issued him with before he came here. "I got that warrant."

"Why didn't you just tell her right away?" Bones asked.

"Well, I was hoping that we could all be friends," Booth said, grinning slightly at the disgruntled expression on Sanborn's face as she studied the warrant.

Legislation might be a pain at times, but he really enjoyed it when he was able to get the authority to poke around in someone's private property; breaking and entering had been almost fun as Angel, but these days it was easier to cut through the crap and get right down to business when the other guy didn't have a legal leg to stand on.

* * *

  
Looking at the image of Earth displayed on the floor below them, Booth smiled slightly as he took in the picture.

He'd lived long enough to see humanity develop from the old belief that Earth was flat to recognising the sheer scale of the world they now inhabited, but it continued to amaze him every time he saw this kind of evidence of just how far humanity had come.

Magic might have been able to access other dimensions for centuries, but even Willow had yet to master the ability to teleport as far as the moon, never mind going to other planets; humanity might not have cracked faster-than-light travel yet, but progress was being made to work on reaching other planets through means that magic could never explore…

"Makes you feel small, doesn't it?" he said, looking over at Bones as she walked up to join him on the balcony.

"Because the picture's so big?" Bones asked.

"No," Booth corrected. "Because the universe is so big."

"You're not looking at the universe," Bones corrected him. "You're looking at an enlarged photograph of Earth."

"Well, you see one thing and I see another thing," Booth said, shrugging at the description; it took some of the romance out of it, even if he understood his partner's point of view. "Personally, I like what I see."

Maybe it was helped by the fact that he'd been alive back in the days when some people still believed that Earth was flat, or maybe it was all the time he'd spent with Fred before Illyria took her, but he really liked it when he had the chance to really see how people had progressed in the last few centuries; it was good to see society progressing without the need for magic.

"Agent Booth; Doctor Brennan?" one of the Space Agency employees said, walking up to the two of them. "I'm afraid Commander James is scheduled for time on the A300 Zero-G. You're welcome to talk to him there."

"The Zero-G?" Bones asked.

"The Vomit Comet," Booth said, grinning at the thought.

This was a definite advantage to being a human with official authority rather than a vampire; he could never have acquired this kind of access when he was Angel.

He was about to have a chance to go on a plane that would reach a point where he'd experience _weightlessness_ …

* * *

  
"Somebody's lying to us, right?" Bones said as they walked through the lab, brainstorming the available facts and stuck for a next move.

"Yeah," Booth confirmed. "Maybe everybody."

"Well, this is your strength," Bones said. "Reading people's minds, telling when they're lying."

"My strength?" Booth repeated. "Wait a second. The trouble is...no, no, you haven't given me anything that I can spring on the suspect to see how he reacts."

"Like what?" Bones asked as they stopped walking.

"Like a murder weapon," Booth clarified. "Or whether the poor bastard was dead before he hit the ground."

"Zack and Angela say he was," Bones replied.

"OK, well, that's something," Booth said; it was a minor detail, but it was something they could use under the right circumstances. "Dead how?"

"Best guess right now, a broadsword," Bones said.

"Broadsword?" Booth repeated, the weapon description at odds with the high-science situation they were currently dealing with; outside of his fight with Lindsey, he couldn't recall the last time he'd seen a human being use an actual _broadsword_. "Like King Arthur?"

"Yes," Bones said.

"Broadsword?" Booth repeated, as his partner walked away. "You know what, Bones? I like the whole alien thing much better. Broadsword? Where do you people come with this stuff?"

As with many things in his new life, this was one area where not being Angel could be a handicap; he had to expect virtually anything as Angel, but as Agent Booth he had to eliminate certain possibilities immediately rather than consider everything.

* * *

  
"Did you eat yet?" Booth asked as he walked into his partner's office to find her still sitting behind her desk, tapping away at her keyboard

"I said I'd wait," Bones said, looking up at him with a smile. "How did you know that James would tell me?"

"Oh, man loves his wife," Booth said. "He may not be strong, but he has a conscience."

"See, I can't tell that stuff," Bones said, standing up to smile at him.

"And I can't tell the difference between coral and bone, so I guess we make a great pair," Booth said, as Bones stood up to accompany him out of the office. "Hey, speaking of marriage, Hodgins is gonna propose to Angela tonight."

"Huh," Bones said thoughtfully.

"What?" Booth asked, looking curiously at him.

"I guess…" Bones said thoughtfully, "right now, it looks to me like marriage is having someone who will slap your enemies and then toss their dead bodies out of airplanes."

"Try not to mention that to Angela," Booth said as they left the lab, privately noting that his partner's description wasn't that far off, even if he'd had phrased it in a more positive manner; he liked to think of marriage as having someone who'd be willing to help you deal with your problems, rather than just someone who'd help you kill your enemies…


	43. The Glowing Bones in the Old Stone House

"So no one touched the body?" Bones asked the major who had reported the murder as they walked through the woods towards their current crime scene; this whole crime had already attracted an unusual amount of attention for a case where nobody knew who they'd discovered.

"Hell no," the major said as they walked. "But we're gonna need an ID ASAP; we could be dealing with a group that's acquired nuclear material."

"It's actually glowing?" Booth asked, wondering at possible explanations for that particular development; he could think of people trying to see in the dark or use sunlight against vampires, but nothing that would affect the skeleton.

"Oh, yeah," the major said.

"I'll need a video link with my lab," Bones said, as another man walked up, lowering a cellphone as he approached.

"Excuse me, Major?" the man said, looking anxiously at the older man. "The reactor at Kensington is secure. All transports carrying radioactive material have been halted."

"Doctor Brennan's gonna need a… video link to the Jeffersonian," the Major said.

"OK, uh, thanks!" Booth said as the other man walked away, talking on his phone once more, before he turned to look at the major. "See, uh, bodies, they don't usually glow."

"Yeah, well, that's why we're taking all these precautions," the major said, as they walked up to the back of a van with radiation suits in it, Booth and Bones tossing their jackets into the van as the major removed a small bottle of pills from his own jacket. "Alright, this is potassium iodide, and these are your suits."

"Pills?" Booth said sceptically, as the major left after grabbing a kit from the back of the van; he'd read up on radiation poisoning after it became an issue (And Angelus had done his own little research into it after his first release to see whether it would be worth using as a means of torture), but it wasn't exactly something he'd ever studied extensively as a human or a vampire.

"Yeah," Bones said as she passed him some of the pills. "It helps the…" she paused to swallow the pills, Booth following her example, "thyroid block the absorption of radiation."

Booth decided not to question the relevance of the thyroid to radiation poisoning, stead shrugging on his radiation suit as Bones did the same.

"You know," Bones said as she adjusted the suit, "Angela turned down Hodgins again."

"What?" Booth asked, shrugging his arm into the sleeve of the suit as he looked at his partner.

"Hodgins proposed," Bones clarified. "Angela turned him down."

"You really wanna talk about that now?" Booth asked, looking sceptically at his partner.

"Why not?" Bones asked, looking genuinely surprised at this statement. "There's been no confirmation of danger yet."

"It's just, you know, weird," Booth said, stuck for anything better to say in this situation; this wasn't exactly the best time to talk with Bones about social suitability, but he was basically committed to doing so now that it had come up. "You know, talking about, uh, marriage when we're, you know, trying to avoid radiation poisoning."

"No, what's weird is Angela thinking about marriage at all," Bones said, as they finished putting their suits on and began to walk towards the house, joined by the major in his own suit.

"People fall in love and they get married," Booth said. "That's what people do."

"I thought you didn't want to talk about it," Bones asked, allowing the major to lead the way so that they could continue talking.

"Look, I'm just saying!" Booth said. "You know, you believe in love, don't you?"

"I believe that dopamine and norepinephrine simulate euphoria because of certain biological triggers like scent, symmetrical features…" Bones said.

"Symmetrical features?" Booth repeated, latching on to the one part of that sentence he felt comfortable arguing about, unable to believe that Bones could reduce love to something that shallow; he couldn't recall ever being attracted to someone just because they were beautiful (Even Angelus had appreciated strong spirits in his victims, albeit mainly so that he could crush their spirits as he seduced them).

"Yes, it's an indication of a good breeder," Bones clarified. "You appear to be a very good breeder."

"How long have you two been going out?" the major said, looking back at them with obvious amusement.

"What?" Bones said in surprise.

"We're-" Booth began, only to stop when he realised that Bones was saying it at the same time and they ended up hitting their helmets' upturned faceplates against each other.

"We're partners," Booth said, stopping talking when he realised Bones had said the same thing.

"That's it," Bones concluded.

"Huh," the major said, grinning in a manner that suggested he didn't believe them. "Me and my partner talk baseball."

"You might not want to admit it," Booth called after his partner as she and the major lowered their faceplates to enter the house- Booth was going to say his piece before he continued this case- "but there are some things like love that just can't be measured in your lab."

His statement made, Booth lowered his faceplate and followed the two into the house, only to be briefly startled at the sound of the radiation detector going off; even when he'd been a full vampire, radiation was not something he liked to deal with.

"What's that mean?" he asked anxiously.

"Three hundred millirams," the major said, his tone only thoughtful. "That's perfectly normal. We get a reading of three thousand or more, then we worry; it could be a weapon."

"Nuclear?" Booth asked.

"The suits would be useless against that," Bones clarified.

"Oh," Booth said, wishing she hadn't said that; he'd known that the suits couldn't cope with something that powerful, but he didn't like being reminded of just how vulnerable he really was. "Great; thanks."

"Body's in there," the major said, indicating the large door to the next room. Walking over to join Bones as she looked at the body, Booth shuddered at the sight; the skeleton glowed in a particularly unnerving manner despite the insects swarming around it, the major glancing anxiously at the radiation monitor as he entered. Booth heard one of the other homeland security agents mention that there was a significant lack of radiation, but that didn't bring him any particular comfort; he knew there were some dangerous alternatives…

"Female," Bones said, studying the bones carefully as she walked over to crouch down beside the corpse. "Mid-twenties, early thirties; Caucasian."

"Looks like she's been here a while," Booth noted.

"No, probably not that long," Bones corrected him. "Rats and weasels work pretty quickly."

"There's no radiation in here," the major said as he removed his suit, staring grimly down at the body.

"Then why the hell's it glowing?" Booth asked.

"I don't know, but it's your problem now," the major said, shrugging as he walked out of the room to join the rest of the Homeland Security agents, already issuing orders for them to depart.

"Multiple stab wounds…" Bones noted, still studying the body in apparent dismissal of the surrounding events.

" _Why_ is she glowing?" Booth asked after a moment's pause confirmed that Bones wasn't going to answer that herself.

"I have no idea," Bones said solemnly. "No idea at all."

That statement didn't make Booth feel particularly comfortable; if Doctor Temperance Brennan didn't know why a body was doing something, there was something going on here that he wasn't that comfortable with.

* * *

  
"OK," Angela said, looking over the results of her fingerprint test on their current victim (Booth was trying not to think about the fact that they'd acquired that after cutting up the victim's hand; what happened to the body wasn't an issue once they were dead). "Carly Victor, twenty-nine. Carly Victor?"

"Do you know her?" Booth asked.

"Yeah," Angela said, looking at him in surprise. "She's that celebrity chef."

"Carly's Table over on Calvert," Bones confirmed. "Chef would explain the cuts to her left hand, and the burns."

"All right," Angela said, bringing up a red-and-black webpage with a couple of photographs on it. "This is her MySpace page."

"Wait a second," Booth said, the logo in the upper-left corner of the page inspiring a recollection. "Is that the place with the famous mac and cheese?"

"Yeah," Angela said. "It's like, impossible to get into."

"Totally impossible," Booth agreed.

"You too?" Angela said.

"Well, mac and cheese… that's God's best handiwork," Booth said; since becoming human, he'd enjoyed expanding his palette more now that he could actually _taste_ what he was cooking.

"She puts leeks in it, and… and little bits of pancetta," Bones put in. "It was delicious."

"How'd you get in?" Booth asked.

"I'm a best-selling author, Booth; I get in anywhere," Bones said briefly. "I took Sully."

"Did he have…?" Booth began, starting to ask the question without thinking about it; he wasn't entirely sure he _wanted_ to know about what Bones had done with her ex, even if it was just going for a particular meal in a particular restaurant (And that was _not_ because he was jealous!)

"He said it was the best he ever ate," Bones said, indicating the MySpace page as her focus returned to the case in front of them. "Why are all those pictures on her page?"

"It's friends, different communities she's joined… blogs, her husband, cooking videos …" Angela said, studying the photographs before she pulled up a low-volume video of their current victim preparing a meal in a kitchen.

"Lot of knives in the kitchen, easy grab for one of these uh, friends to stab her," Booth noted. "Why don't you check the pages and see if anyone had a problem with her?"

"I can't imagine anyone wanting to kill Carly," Bones said, attracting a surprised stare from Angela; normally the artist was the one expressing disbelief that a particular victim had been killed. "She came out to see if we were enjoying our meal. We talked for a while. I was... supposed to go back and see her next week."

"Are you OK, honey?" Angela asked, looking anxiously at her friend.

"Yeah. I'm just used to victims being strangers..." Bones said, pausing the video to look solemnly at Carly on the screen. "We should tell her husband, Booth."

"Sure," Booth said, stuck for anything else to say.

He was used to dealing with strangers being the victim as Booth, but as Angelus he'd more often than not known his victims before he killed them to make it more interesting; it hadn't been from the same side as when he looked at murders now, but it was still easier to think about the people Darla had killed than the people Angelus had killed, just because he hadn't done it himself…

* * *

  
"These white shards were found in the trunk and some were caught on her socks," Hodgins explained, looking over the fragments through a microscope in the main lab as Booth watched, Bones currently going over other details in the side lab with Angela. "FBI techs also found similar shards in the old house. I'm running a chemical analysis, but I'd say this is some kind of ceramic."

"What, like pottery?" Booth said, looking at Hodgins in surprise; the idea that someone would bother breaking a pot in the middle of a crime like this didn't quite make sense to him, even before he took the location into account…

"Actually ceramics are used in everything from semiconductors to medical implants," Hodgins corrected him, looking up at him with a slight smile before returning his attention to the microscope. "This is a very hard ceramic. It's probably eight Mohs."

"Yeah?" Booth said, trying to prompt Hodgins for more information about why that news was relevant.

"Yeah," Hodgins replied simply.

"What's that mean?" Booth asked, once it was clear the entomologist wasn't going to elaborate on that detail.

"That is was most likely used for industrial applications," Hodgins said, moving away from the microscope to look thoughtfully at him. "Do… hmm."

"What?" Booth said, as Hodgins cut himself off mid-sentence.

"No, I'm not gonna ask you again," Hodgins said, getting up from his seat in front of the microscope and walking over to another table.

"About the ceramic stuff?" Booth asked; it wasn't like he'd been that much use to the guy.

"No; Angela," Hodgins said, turning back to look contemplatively at Booth before he shook his head. "No more; I'm done."

"Oh," Booth said, wondering what the other man was specifically talking about here. "You're done with Angela?"

"No," Hodgins said firmly. "But… Hey, I fell in love with a free spirit, and if getting married makes her feel trapped or something, then I'm… I'm just gonna have to deal with it."

"Right, so you don't wanna get married anymore," Booth said, hoping he was following his friend's train of thought.

"Sure I do," Hodgins said with a satisfied smile.

"You know what?" Booth said, rolling his eyes and walking over to the exit to this part of the lab; maybe he could just walk out of this conversation before it became any more complicated. "This whole ceramics stuff was making more sense to me …"

"But Angela doesn't," Hodgins clarified. "And I don't want to drive her away like you did with Rebecca."

"Whoa," Booth said, turning back to look at Hodgins, suddenly urgently needing to clarify the situation. "I did _not_ drive Rebecca away; we both agreed that it wasn't right."

"After you asked and she said no," Hodgins noted.

"Well, when you say it like that it's…" Booth began awkwardly; he preferred to think that the proposal just made them think about what they had rather than put Rebecca completely off the idea of being with him…

"If it had been right, it wouldn't matter if you were married or not, would it?" Hodgins said, walking over to Booth. "Because you'd have a life together."

"Great," Booth said dismissively, wishing Hodgins would stop this conversation before it got any further; too many of his old friends had never even made it to the point of thinking about marriage before ending up dead. "Then why not get married?"

"Because then we wouldn't be able to be together," Hodgins said, grinning as he spoke. "See, this is all becoming so clear now!"

"Not really," Booth said uncertainly; he hadn't been this confused since he'd heard some of Fred's physics talks, and this was meant to be about stuff he _understood_ …

"You put on that macho front, but inside you understand," Hodgins said, grinning broadly as he looked at Booth.

"I don't understand," Booth corrected him.

"That which the mind can't grasp…" Hodgins said in satisfaction (Booth wondered if the guy was even listening to him any more).

"Alright," Booth interjected before Hodgins could say any more. "You know, I'm just trying to catch a murderer, but you seem to have gone way past that."

"It means a lot, knowing that you get it, man," Hodgins said (Booth wondered if Hodgins was even listening to him at this point). "Most guys… not secure enough to admit that."

"I have a headache…" Booth groaned, completely lost as to what Hodgins thought he 'got' right now.

The phonecall he received was a welcome chance to change the topic; Hodgins might have given an enthusiastic hug for reasons that still confused him, considering that he hadn't actually done anything to support Hodgins' decision, but at least he didn't have to think too much about that when the murder had to take priority…

* * *

  
Sitting at the kitchen table in his partner's apartment, Booth smiled at the thought of what was coming up.

It might not be a conventional date by any means- and he _definitely_ wasn't going to call it a 'date'; it was just two friends who happened to be of the opposite gender from each other having a meal together-, but ever since he'd regained his humanity, one of the things he'd enjoyed most was the restoration of his ability to really taste food; he could eat as Angel, but anything other than meat always seemed relatively bland to his blood-focused tastebuds…

"You know," he said, looking over at Bones as she worked away at the counter, "you should let me help."

"No," Bones responded, bringing a bowl over to set it down in front of him. "Cleaning up; you can do that."

"Great," Booth said, as Bones collected her own bowl and joined him at the table. "Wow; mac and cheese! Bones, this… this looks fantastic!"

"Really?" Bones asked, looking anxiously at him as she sat down opposite him.

"Oh, I mean, you shouldn't have," Booth said, indicating the food with his fork. "I mean, all this work just for me?"

"What?" Bones said in surprise. "No, I mean… it wasn't that much."

"Mmm," Booth said as he took his first bite, savouring the taste in satisfaction. "This is unbelievable."

"You like it?" Bones asked.

"I'd like to be alone with it," Booth said, laughing at the idea even as he took another bite.

"She said I could go with my instincts, so I put in a little fresh ground nutmeg," Bones said.

"Well, she taught you well," Booth said, nodding reassuringly at his partner. "Thanks, Bones."

"Yeah, well, you know… we have to eat, right?" Bones said.

"Yeah," Booth said, nodding in agreement of her tone, hoping she understood the deeper meaning before his statement. "Gotta eat… always gotta eat."

As he tucked into his meal with greater relish, Booth wondered if things would have been this easy between he and Buffy if they'd actually been able to share a meal; when he was living in Sunnydale, he'd never really had the chance to prepare food for anyone else, and even after he started cooking for his friends in Los Angeles it had never really been a _shared_ activity as he'd never been able to fully appreciate the food himself…


	44. Stargazer in a Puddle

"You should've worn gumboots," Bones said, glancing back at Booth in amusement as he stepped carefully over the puddles of mud in the abandoned warehouse that was their latest crime scene.

"I'm fine," he replied, trying to talk and keep an eye on his feet; he'd walked in worse conditions in the past, but his FBI image required clothing that didn't get muddy as easily as his old attire did. "You know I-I'm agile."

As they walked through the old warehouse, with various forensics teams working around them, Booth was briefly stuck for what else he could say before they reached the body until a potential topic came to him.

"So," he said, still moving as briskly as possible to keep up with his partner, "Hodgins asked, uh, Angela to, uh, marry him."

"Twice," Bones replied, her tone suggesting that she found the topic as interesting as watching paint dry.

"Oh, and she, uh, turned him down both times," Booth continued, undeterred by her lack of enthusiasm.

"I heard all this from Angela," Bones said.

"Yeah," Booth said, having to move around a particularly muddy patch while Bones just walked on through it, "but did she tell you that he said that he wasn't going to ask her to marry him?"

"Yes," Bones said, clearly becoming annoyed with the questions.

"And she said?" Booth asked, committed to finishing this conversation now.

"I'd like to marry you," Bones said.

"Kinda sudden, Bones," Booth said. "Let me think about it."

"What?" Bones said, looking at him in shock. "No, Booth; that's what Angela told Hodgins…"

She trailed off as she noticed him laughing. "You're joking. You know, a lot of psychologists say that jokes are the way that we manifest a lot of our hidden desires."

Deciding not to follow that up that topic, Booth kept on walking, only to find his right foot sinking into a large puddle, staring in frustration at his soaked leg.

"You OK?" Bones asked, looking curiously back at him.

"Yeah, fine," Booth said, shaking his leg as he looked at the cops currently gathered around the stairs leading down to what was presumably the crime scene. "What have we got?"

"During a foot pursuit last night a suspect tosses a knife into this muck in an effort to avoid incarceration," the cop explained. "The fluid gets drained and we start finding stuff."

"Define 'stuff'," Bones asked.

"Stuff?" the cop said, indicating a nearby plastic sheet covered with objects before he led them down the stairs. "Cell phones, guns, knives, crack vials, evidently you wanna lose something in this vicinity, you toss it in here. Denizens think it's some sort of bottomless pit."

"Does the word 'concise' mean anything to you?" Bones asked, as they followed the cop down the stairs.

"Well, we found that," the cop said, indicating a skeleton in a half-submerged shopping cart a short distance from the stairs. "Concise enough?"

"Small," Booth said, as the group shone their flashlights at the body, looking over at his partner for confirmation. "Kid?"

"Female," Bones said, as she walked into the water to squat down beside the body. "Pelvic girdle and skull sutures suggest… pre-adolescent."

Booth barely registered his partner's additional confirmation of the victim's age with a glance at a nearby object that she identified as a child's pencil-case; kids were always the worst…

"How long has she been dead?" he asked.

"Does this freeze over in the winter?" Bones asked, looking over at the cop.

"Yeah, solid," the other man confirmed, clearly just as disturbed by their discovery as they were.

"It's possible she was placed here as long ago as last fall," Bones said.

"Cause of death?" Booth asked, making notes as he tried not to think too much about this latest corpse.

"Looks like a gunshot wound to the back of the head," Bones said, shining her torch at the relevant injury.

"Can you guess the calibre?" Booth asked.

"Nothing larger than a .22," Bones responded.

"Find any .22s?" Booth asked the other cop.

"Two," the cop replied.

"OK," Booth said, trying to focus on what he could do at this point, "let's get an FBI Forensics team down here to search for bullet fragments."

"OK, we'll call it in right now," the cop said, heading back up the stairs as Bones stood up to shown Booth a pebble that she'd just removed from the skeleton's hand, the pebble being revealed as having a few small words written on it.

"I love you," Booth read grimly.

"You said that paedophiles can delude themselves into thinking they love their victims," Bones said.

 _Paedophiles_ …

This was one killer Booth _really_ hated; he might have killed children to make a point to their parents, but even Angelus had never done _that_ to kids (Albeit because it wouldn't have been 'fun', but the point still stood that he'd had _some_ kind of limit)!

Regardless of how this case turned out, it wasn't going to be easy on any level…

* * *

  
"Tell me something, Max," Booth said as he tossed a folder and wallet down on the table before his partner's father before he removed the other man's handcuffs, his brief conversation with Caroline leaving him still frustrated at his inability to legally sentence Max to anything, "what's the most hazardous classification of an electrician?"

"Class one, division one," Max replied nonchalantly. "You planning on making a career change?"

Booth didn't reply, instead taking the water glass that Max had been drinking from and pulling it towards him with the ends of his handcuffs.

"You checking out my prints?" Max said.

"Max," Booth said, deciding to be as honest as he could with this man he honestly had a degree of respect for, even if his job left him legally required to arrest him. "You know I like you, and I hate to hurt Bones, but it's my job to catch you… and I'm very good at my job."

"Well, you'd have to be to work with my daughter," Max said, standing up and smiling at him as he held out his hand. "What do you say? Shake hands with an old con. Or is that bad for the FBI image?"

"You abandoned her as a child," Booth said, staring firmly at Max; he liked the guy in a strange way, but he had to remind himself of what this man had done to his partner's life because he thought he knew best (At least he'd done what he could to provide for Connor when he'd 'abandoned' him, rather than leaving it completely up to chance). "You don't think she feels that? Every time you pop in and out of her life? Mmm?"

After staring at him for a moment, Max laughed.

"You're just saying that so I'll hit you, then you got a reason to lock me up," he said, nodding briefly at Booth in acknowledgement. "Twenty years ago, that would have worked."

As the man formerly known as Max Keenan left the room after giving Booth a brief pat on the back, Booth wondered why things always seemed so much more complicated when he was human; even when he hadn't wanted to kill Darla after she was resurrected by Wolfram & Hart, or when he'd been feeling guilty about that whole mess with Penn continuing his old murders, he'd never been that conflicted about leaving her alive as he was about dealing with Max…

* * *

  
"Do you like your father?" Bones asked, looking at Booth as they sat at the diner, the anthropologist stirring her coffee while Booth chewed at his food.

"I love my father," Booth replied, trying to focus on the essential positive moments of his relationships with both his fathers; looking back, Liam's father had been fundamentally well-intentioned even if he couldn't understand his son, and part of the issues bothering Seeley's father were caused by various other factors that he couldn't fully condemn, even if he could never accept them.

"I think I love my father," Bones said.

"Well, that's normal," Booth said, briefly considering amending his earlier response before deciding against it; explaining why he felt that way would just open up a whole mess of issues that he wasn't up to discussing right now and wasn't sure he ever would be.

"But he ran out on me and Russ, he robbed people, he's a murderer…" Bones said, her face strained in a manner that suggested that she was about to cry. "He got my mother killed, how does he expect me to…?"

"It's hard to trust someone who's abandoned you, especially a parent," Booth said, knowing how that felt from both sides; even if he hadn't abandoned Connor on purpose, it had still required fairly drastic measure to get his son to have faith in him again before he received his Shanshu (And he _really_ didn't want to think how Connor would react to him if they met up again now…).

"Am I terrible for not wanting to care about my father?" Bones asked.

"Look, Bones," Booth said, deciding to focus on what he could tell her rather than what he couldn't, "your father is going to do something tomorrow that's going to hurt you. How do you forgive that?"

"I'm not a bad… daughter?" Bones asked hesitantly. "Bad person?"

"You're not a bad anything," Booth said, smiling reassuringly at her.

Despite his best intentions, he was privately grateful when Hodgins called with an update on the case; as much as he wanted to help his partner, this whole topic was _really_ complicated, to say nothing of risking delving into issues that he was far from ready to discuss at this point…

* * *

  
Walking up to Max Keenan as the other man headed for his car, Booth wondered what it said about him as a person that he was going to try and do this; the man was his partner's father, and he was going to _arrest_ him?

He had various motives for doing so, of course, ranging from it being his job to the fact that the guy needed to shape up and be there for his daughter, but this was still the strangest human thing he'd ever had to deal with (Some of the things he'd dealt with as Angel were just strange by any standard).

"Am I gonna need to use my gun, Max?" he said, focusing on the issue at hand as he looked at the old con.

"Got your piece of paper?" Max said, sighing in recognition that asking that question was pointless.

"Max Keenan," Booth said, as he walked up to the man who was currently his physical elder even if he was chronologically anything but. "I'm placing you under arrest for the murder of Deputy Director-"

"Alright, alright, fine; you can take me," Max interjected. "You know what? You're right; I'm not going to abandon her again."

"You're not going to resist?" Booth said, surprised at this turn of events.

"It's your lucky day, I guess," Max said, smiling and shrugging slightly at Booth.

"OK, great," Booth said, only for Max to step back as he approached.

"No, you know what?" the apparently older man said, pointing apologetically at Booth. "I'm wrong, I can't go quietly. It's not my nature."

"Max," Booth said, looking patiently at his opponent, "I've got a gun."

"It's not my nature," Max repeated. "You're going to have to shoot me. You understand?"

"Not your nature?" Booth repeated, looking incredulously at the guy; Darla had defied her nature and _staked_ herself to save another, and Max couldn't bring himself to give up without a fight?

"Call it a character flaw," Max said.

Left with no other option, Booth took out his gun.

"Yeah," Max said, speaking even as Booth took the bullets out of the gun. "Shoot me. Shoot me, but in the leg if you don't mind."

Ignoring Max's mistaken assumption, Booth shrugged off his jacket and moved into a combat stance as Max did the same, only for Booth to punch Max in the face just before the older man could realise that the fight was actually about to start.

"Hey, hey," Max said, "That's good, kid, you're throwing…"

He struck Booth in the face before he finished his sentence, sending Booth staggering back from the unexpected attack. "What's the matter, kid? Got a glass jaw?"

"You know what?" Booth said, punching Max in the face in retaliation as they began to circle each other. "You talk too much."

"Geez, right in the face?" Max said, only for Booth's next blow to leave him bent over with a pleading hand outstretched. "Time? Time?"

"You had enough?" Booth said, walking up to the older man.

"Wait, wait," Max said. "I'm old…"

"There's no time-outs during an arrest," Booth said, only to be met by another punch from Max as the older man stood back up. Max delivered another punch, only for Booth's next two blows to knock Max to the ground before he could strike back again, leaving Max on the ground in obvious pain.

"OK, that's it, that's it," Max gasped, lying on his back like a tortoise that had been turned over. "I've had enough."

"OK," Booth said, walking up to Max as he pulled out his handcuffs, before an unexpected punch to the groin left him in new agony as he fell to the ground beside the other man, leaving them booth staring up at the sky in varying degrees of pain.

"That really hurt…" he muttered, lying on the ground in pain beside the older man, even as he noted that at least Max wasn't trying to take advantage of the opportunity to get away despite the obvious opening available to him.

This fight had been as embarrassing as hell, but at least Max wasn't going to ditch his daughter again...

* * *

  
He'd been through a lot of experiences in his time as Angel, but Booth still wasn't used to being in churches. He had never been one of those vampires concerned about the possibility of walking on holy ground even when he'd been Angelus, but he'd just never had much interest in going into churches for the more practical reason that ceremonies were almost always conducted during the day; where was the point in terrorising a ceremony where you wouldn't be able to do anything without putting yourself at greater risk?

He appreciated the invitation, of course, but that didn't mean it wasn't still strange to be standing in the back in a tux as part of a wedding party, Zack and Cam with him as Bones came down the stairs in a purple dress with a large bow on the front…

"How do I look?" his partner asked awkwardly.

"Good," Booth said, stuck for anything better to say; it was nice, but he'd been around Buffy and Cordelia alone long enough to have a fair idea of what worked.

"Well, how come yours looks so much better?" Bones said, looking at Cam, who was wearing an identical dress with the bow at the back.

"Come on," Cam said, walking up to the other woman. "I took this and yanked…"

"Have you been to Iraq?" Zack asked, drawing Booth's attention from the two women.

"That's classified information, you aren't cleared for that," Booth said, even as he appreciated the chance not to think about whatever Bones and Cam were doing just a few feet away.

"Does it hurt to get shot?" Zack asked.

"What?" Booth said, confused at where Zack was going with these questions.

"I've been blown up- that wasn't as bad as I expected- but I've never been shot," Zack said.

"Booth?" Cam said, saving him having to respond to that query in a manner that Zack would understand.

"Yeah?" Booth said, turning back to look at Cam and Bones, her partner's dress now adjusted and the bow at her back.

"Better?" Cam said, indicating the adjusted attire.

"Wow," Booth said, whistling before he could stop himself. "You look great."

"You said I looked good before," Bones said, clearly confused.

"Whose day is it, huh?" Booth said, trying to avoid that topic before it got too complicated as he grabbed Bones and led her towards the aisle. "It's Angela's; come on, let's go, there you go."

As they walked out into the main church, Booth allowed himself a brief smile as he joined Bones walking up the aisle, followed by Cam and Zack; in a world where he'd experienced so much of the crap humanity had to offer, at last he'd get to participate in one of the better things…

"Bones?" he said, remembering that he hadn't had the chance to discuss this earlier.

"Yeah?" Bones replied, following his cue and keeping her voice low.

"Listen," he said, suddenly regretting bringing this up given their limited opportunity to discuss it. "I'm, uh, sorry I had to arrest your father."

"Do we have to talk about that right now?" Bones said, unintentionally voicing his own thoughts. "You did what you had to do, I understand."

"Yeah, but-" Booth began, pausing as the two separated at the alter until the woman playing the harp began to play along with a more preppy, less wedding-based beat as Angela walked in, her father at her side and Angela herself wearing a strange-looking dress that actually came with a small hood.

"Bones?" Booth said, whispering over at his partner.

"What?" Bones replied, her attention focused on Angela as she came up the aisle.

"He could have gotten away," Booth said.

"What?" Bones said, her attention turning sharply back to him.

"We go into a fight and your dad could have escaped capture," Booth explained.

"So he beat you in a fight?" Bones asked.

"No, no, I didn't say that," Booth said; regardless of what point he was trying to make, he wasn't going to let anyone think that Max could have defeated him.

"What?" Bones said. "So… you beat him, but you gave him a chance to escape?"

"No, I didn't say that," Booth said, ignoring standard wedding protocol to walk up to his partner despite the bride approaching them as they spoke.

"Well, I don't see any other alternative," Bones said.

"No he didn't run away because he felt if he abandoned you, he would have lost you forever," Booth said; with time constraints the way they were, it was best to get it all said now. "Just thought you should know."

After a moment, Bones leaned over to hug him, prompting a smile from the agent and ex-vampire as he held her in his arms; he might have inadequately explained what had happened earlier, but at least the _sentiment_ was understood.

"Thanks, Booth," Bones said, her voice low as she continued to hold him…

"Um… hi," Angela said, waving slightly as the artist brought Booth back to the reality of their current location. "I'd like to get married now."

Looking awkwardly at his partner, Booth stepped back, satisfied that at least his partner looked as sheepish as he felt right now.

"Welcome everybody," the minister said, proceeding as though the brief distraction hadn't happened. "We have come together to join in matrimony Jack Stanley Hodgins, and Angela Pearly Gates Montenegro. Who gives this woman?"

"I give you this beautiful woman," Angela's father said, lowering Angela's hood and kissing her cheek before he shook Hodgins' hand and stepped back, letting Angela move forward to take her place beside Hodgins.

"Angela and Jack have invited us here to share something beautiful," the minister said. "Two people have invited their friends and family to say, you are the one I love. You are the one whom for I forsake all others…"

Before the minister could say any more, a man in a suit walked into the room, a file of papers in his hands as he looked around the room.

"Excuse me," the man said, looking up at the minister. "Is this the Hodgins/Montenegro nuptials?"

"It's trying to be," Angela said.

"Well, I'm with the state department," the man said, holding up a badge as he walked up to the couple at the altar. "It's imperative that I speak with Hodgins and Montenegro before these proceedings… proceed."

"Come on, then," Caroline said, getting up from her seat. "Let's get this figured out."

"We'll, uh, be right back," Hodgins said, taking Angela's hand before the two of them followed Caroline and the man in the suit out of the room, leaving Booth to sit down on the stairs by the altar out of a lack of anything else to do.

"Booth?" Zack said, leaning over to talk to the other man.

"Yeah?" Booth said.

"Is there any sense in ducking when someone shoots at you?" the young anthropologist asked.

"Your body ducks whether it wants to or not," Booth said, looking up at Zack's responding nod before he stood up, deciding to tackle the one question Zack hadn't presented an answer to. "Why?"

"You can read this later, then explain it to everyone," Zack said, handing Booth a letter. A quick glance revealed that the letter had originated from the White House, which meant that it didn't take long to deduce the nature of the contents; the White House would only request someone with Zack's skill-set under a very particular set of circumstances…

"Why me?" Booth asked.

"You know more about duty and honour than anybody else I know," Zack replied.

This was one situation where Booth had no idea how to respond to what Zack had just said; people had respected him as a warrior back when he was Angel, but the idea of someone regarding him as a moral figure to be admired…

Somehow, the fact that it was a guy like Zack just made it all the more meaningful; the guy was socially inept, but he still felt that Booth could be trusted as an inspiration…

"Change of plans," Hodgins said, opening the doors to look back at the people in the church

"Go directly to the reception, on us."

"Thanks for coming," Angela said, before she and Hodgins turned to run for the door, leaving Booth standing before the minister, Bones in front of him, and completely stuck for what to do next even before Bones asked what they should do now.

There were definitely times when it was easier to be Angel than Booth…


	45. The Widow's Son in the Windshield

As attempts to get their partnership back on its metaphorical horse after Zack's departure went, a case involving a skull tossed off a bridge lacked the kind of scale that Booth thought they needed, but he was stuck for anything better to do right now.

That was the problem with working for the government, really; as much as he wanted to do his own research to find a case, he was dependent on them giving him assignments.

Still, at least when he didn't have anything on the books he could pretty much make his own hours so long as he was available in case that changed; right now he was outside, enjoying a sandwich in the sunshine-

"This is good," he said, just as his phone rang, prompting him to glance at the screen before he answered to confirm that it was the Jeffersonian. "First time you call me in weeks-"

" _There's scoring on the skull_ ," Bones said.

"Scoring?" Booth repeated, suddenly left with a bad feeling about this case; things that ate people weren't high on his list of things he'd like to confront…

" _Yes, scrapes_ ," Bones clarified.

"Yeah, I know what scoring means," Booth said.

" _The scraping is uniform in spacing but not depth, which suggests an ungual pattern_ ," Bones continued.

"What's an uncle pattern?" Booth asked, opening his car door to lean against the side as he listened.

" _No, ungual_ ," Bones said, repeating the last sound before saying something further away from the phone that he couldn't quite hear.

" _Something chewed on the skull_ ," Cam's voice said over the line; it was slightly less audible than Bones, as though she was further away from the phone, but he could still hear her clearly enough.

"Oh," Booth, seizing on the immediate possibilities; whether it was a demon or a human, he might as well start by checking to see if it was an animal to eliminate what people would consider the most obvious alternative. "Like a bear or a dog?"

" _Human, Booth_ ," Cam said. " _Doctor Brennan is saying human_."

" _In the vernacular, our victim's face was chewed off by a cannibal_ ," Bones confirmed.

"Great," Booth said, throwing his snack away, his appetite suddenly lost.

Even if it wasn't a demon with a human-like mouth, this was _not_ going to be an easy case; cannibals were just twisted by any definition.

* * *

  
"How did you meet Gavin Nichols, Ms Trattner?" Booth asked the older woman that had been their victim's apparent girlfriend, Angela sitting in the observation room as he showed Amelia the scrapbook, the artist studying copies of the pictures at her end; it was a complicated way to conduct an interrogation, but right now Angela's insight was more potentially useful than Bones's usual approach.

"I'm a cellist with the National Symphony," Amelia replied. "Gavin guested as first violinist three years ago."

" _Check out the photo of them kissing_ ," Angela noted through Booth's earpiece. " _Huh, mega-tongue action_."

"How long did you, uh, know him this way?" Booth asked, indicating the photo Angela had just been talking about, up in the corner of the scrapbook.

"Within a couple of weeks of our meeting," Amelia replied.

" _He was barely shaving then_ ," Angela commented. " _What is she doing, playing squeeze and squish with a nineteen year old_?"

"Squeeze and squish?" Booth repeated; he knew that Angela was relatively casual about scientific terms, but hearing a term like that from a scientist was still a surprise.

"I beg your pardon?" Amelia asked.

"With a nineteen-year-old?" Booth said; since he'd said it already, he might as well act as though he'd been planning on it and take it from there.

"Gavin pursued me," Amelia said. "His… taste ran to older women."

"Ms. Trattner," Booth said, deciding to avoid that issue- he might have dated younger women in the past, but at least they looked like they were his physical age and he had the excuse that most women his _chronological_ age would have just wanted to kill him on principal-, "do you think, ah, Gavin was killed for his violin?"

"No; no one does," Amelia replied. "You can't sell it anywhere. And we would know by now if they were trying to ransom it back."

"Can you think of anyone who'd want him dead?" Booth asked.

"Every violinist in the world," Amelia said, her tone suggesting that he should have known that.

"Why?" Booth asked.

"No one had seen left hand technique like Gavin's since Franz von Biber," Amelia explained. "His little finger was insured for ten million dollars."

Booth wondered how or why anyone would insure a finger in particular; did that mean that the guy couldn't get paid if the rest of his hand was injured but the finger was fine…?

"Great," he said, stuck for anything else to say. "Thank you, Ms. Trattner. Thank you for your cooperation. You, you can leave now."

" _Wait a minute, Booth_ ," Angela's voice said over his earpiece.

"Wha-?" Booth began, before realising that Amelia was still in the room and didn't know what he was doing. "One moment."

" _Check out her face in the quartet photo_ ," Angela said.

"Just one more question, I'm sorry," he said, turning his attention back to Amelia as he took the scrapbook back from her, turned it to the right page and indicated the photo Angela had just mentioned; now that Angela had drawn his attention to it, Amelia definitely seemed to be glaring at Gavin as he played in this image. "Ah, what's going on here?"

"It was impossible not to watch him when he played," Amelia said.

"You don't look impressed," Booth said. "You look sad."

" _Like she lost something_ ," Angela pointed out.

"Like you've lost him," Booth said to Amelia, taking Angela's suggestion and following it with his own line of speculation.

" _Because she knew he was going to die_ ," Angela speculated.

"Like there was someone else," Booth said.

" _There was_?" Angela said in surprise.

"There was someone else in his life," Booth continued, as he looked at Amelia. "Someone I need to know about."

" _Brilliant, Booth_ ," Angela said. " _You are brilliant. OK, this time, I-_ "

"Shh!" he said, trying to quieten the artist before he realised how it must have looked to Amelia. "Sorry; nothing. Just, quietly… who was it, Amelia?"

In response, Amelia turned a page in the album and indicated another photograph. "Ask her."

"Rona Sumner?" Booth said, looking at the picture of what appeared to be some kind of fancy party, Gavin in a tuxedo besides an older woman in a peach-coloured dress.

" _Who's Rona Sumner_?" Angela asked.

"Wife of Leo Sumner, Deputy Director of the Secret Service," Booth replied; Amelia would probably assume that he was just thinking out loud.

However things went for the rest of this investigation, if it involved someone with that kind of government post, things were _definitely_ about to get complicated…

* * *

  
"No, it's not just because you have a diamond tooth," Booth said, looking in frustration at their current suspect, Jason Harkness, a young man clearly determined to be as uncooperative as possible, pulled in due to his past community service cleaning up around the vault.

"You don't know why you're here, Jason?" Bones asked.

"It seems like that part should be your responsibility," Jason replied, smiling slightly in a manner that exposed the tooth that brought him here.

"Think about it," Booth said. "You're a smart boy, Jason; you went to private school."

"Six of them," Jason said, a slight edge of pride in his voice. "Got kicked out of every one."

"Yeah, for attacking people in their sleep," Bones noted.

"I got counselling; I'm cured," Jason said.

"So you did your little community service mopping floors for the historical society people," Booth said, leaning forward to look at the young man. "How the hell did you get in the vault?"

"At the old bank?" Jason asked.

"He just doesn't really strike me as the kind of guy who would sit beside a vault all night listening to tumblers through a stethoscope," Booth noted to his partner; hopefully, Jason _was_ the kind of guy who could be provoked if his ego was attacked.

"He probably found the combination while he was cleaning up somewhere," Bones said.

"Nobody can get in the vault," Jason said. "It's what you call impregnable."

"Not true," Bones said, reaching down and picking up the appropriate plastic evidence bag, laying it on the table before Jason. "This is the transmitter we found in the vault."

"Normal guy comes across a treasure in a vault, starts, what, selling it off," Booth said. "You went a whole different way."

"Could you bite this, please?" Bones asked, removing a wax cylinder from a box and placing it in front of Jason.

"No," Jason said.

"Doctor Brennan was only being polite," Booth said. "We have a warrant for that tooth, Jason. So, either you bite, or I'll make you."

"What do you need it for?" Jason asked.

"The diamond in your incisor left a mark on the skull," Bones said.

"In the skull that you gnawed on," Booth said, to make sure that Jason knew what they were talking about.

"It's not like chicken or pork, you know," Jason said, after a moment's silence as he stared at the two of them. "People always say that. It's more like beef. The face is a little sweeter, more tender. The younger the person, the better. Except for babies. Babies tastes kind of like fish."

As Jason bit down on the cylinder, Booth was struck by the sudden thought that he was looking at a man who'd done something even he had never done back when he was evil.

He'd drunk blood as Angel and Angelus, but he had never actually sat down to chew on someone's limbs; even Angelus found that concept sick, if only because it just seemed like a stupid method of disposing of someone…

He could kind of understand it when you were stuck for options in a deserted environment or something like that- he recalled a couple of books he'd read once where people turned to cannibalism due to a lack of other meat after most animals died in some catastrophic accident or another- but what the hell made someone decide that it was a good idea to eat people when you were living in the modern world?

* * *

  
"Show them the badge again!" Bones said, as the two of them stood in the interior of the jail where Jason had been left after their earlier interrogation; the new evidence of older bite marks might not help them identify their target, but it certainly gave them something to go on.

"They don't see why we have to see Jason in the middle of the night," Booth said, fuming at the bureaucratic process that once again slowed him down; as Angel, he could at least afford to break in to get what he needed. "Shift changes in two hours; hell, they could make us wait until morning."

After standing in silence for a moment, he decided that now was as good a time as any to tackle one issue that had been bothering him since his partner brought it up earlier. "You know, you weren't upset that Zack was gone."

"Yes I was!" Bones protested.

"OK, yeah, but you were more upset over the fact that I didn't stop him from going in the first place," Booth clarified. "I mean, look, I could've said to him, Zack, 'Iraq is no place for a guy like you'."

"And he'd never have left," Bones finished for him, walking up to him with an earnestness about her expression that she hadn't shown before now. "You could have stopped him. Why didn't you do that?"

"Whatever Zack's deal is- OK, his weirdness, whatever you want to call it-" Booth began.

"I call it genius," Bones interjected.

"He's a… man," Booth finished; he wasn't going to tackle the issue of defining Zach right now. "He's a… he's a strange man, but he's a man who wanted to serve a larger purpose."

"This is some alpha male rite of passage?" Bones asked.

"No," Booth said.

"You mean… go to war?" his partner said, still trying to clarify what he was talking about.

"Wrong," Booth said. "No, Zack needed to leave the nest. The same way you did when you wanted to leave the lab and see the world for the first time. And I helped you do that. How could I stop Zack from doing the exact same thing in his own way?"

He didn't mention that he also regarded it as an apt example of his own evolution as a person; just as Buffy, Doyle and Cordelia had helped him evolve as a person, wasn't it, in a strange way, now his duty to give other people the chances to progress that he'd been given?

"Agent Booth?" a voice said from behind him, cutting off that train of thought as Booth turned to see the warden and a guard on the other side of the bars.

"What is it?" he asked.

"It's easier if you come and see," the warden said, as the guard opened the door and led them further into the prison.

"So we came in to wake him," the guard explained, as they approached Jason's cell, "and this is what we found."

"Oh my God," Booth said, staring in horror at the sight before them; Jason, naked in his cell, draped over the bars that served as his door, a dagger in his chest and his body arranged in the same pose as the silver skeleton they'd previously uncovered in the vault.

Booth barely registered the guard commenting that they were going on full lockup; anyone skilled enough to get inside a police station long enough to do this without leaving a trace was almost certainly already gone by now.

Evidently, if Jason was an apprentice to somebody, his master _really_ knew what he was doing…

* * *

  
"The ancient Greek section translated the motto at the back of the vault door, 'will no one help the Widow's Son'," Bones explained as she and Booth sat down on a bench near the Reflecting Pool as sunrise approached. "Hodgins was right. This killer's part of something bigger."

"Here's your coffee," Booth said, stuck for anything else to say to that statement outside of the obvious as he handed Bones one of the two cups he'd collected earlier.

"Gavin Nichols' violin was in there," Bones said, ignoring the offered cup as she continued talking. "I bet there are belongings from other murder victims too. We have to catalogue every item in that vault."

"Hot coffee," Booth said, offering her the cup again.

"After we do the visual and microscopic examination of each human bone in the silver skeleton, we'll take samples and do an in-depth auxiological breakdown," Bones said, clearly caught up in her topic; he hadn't heard someone babble this much since Willow or Fred. "We really have a lot to do-"

"Yeah, starting with coffee," Booth said, forcibly handing the cup to her.

"An isotope profile will allow us to narrow down possible geographical hits…" Bones began, lifting the hot cup to her lips before Booth put his hand in front of her lips.

"Hey, it's hot!" Booth said, looking warningly at his partner as he lowered the cup. "You were gonna burn yourself, Bones."

"Thank you," Bones replied,

"Listen," Booth said, taking his hand away from the cup, using the opportunity to tackle the one issue they hadn't addressed yet, "this whole serial-killer, it's not gonna be our usual case."

"Why?" Bones asked.

"Why?" Booth repeated. "Because it's big and he's bad."

"I don't see what difference that makes," Bones said, evidently puzzled at the distinction.

"Cause you have to slow down, right, take a breath," Booth explained; his experience with this kind of killer may have mainly been while on the other side of the law, when he was the one being hunted, but that gave him a uniquely effective insight into what would work best to stop this guy. "You have to realize that this is not a sprint, it's gonna be a marathon. Marathon, Bones, coming from the Greek meaning 'really really really long run'."

"That's not how the word 'marathon' originated," Bones said.

"Look, there's something else I gotta know, and it's important," Booth said; he wasn't going to get into a linguistic debate about something that minor. "We solid?"

"You and me?" Bones said. "Yeah!"

"No, not just you and me," Booth said. "Squints, too. Zack is back for good, Angela and Hodgins have their head back in the game, and Cam, she's locked in."

"Why are you asking me this?" Bones asked.

"Because," Booth said, momentarily stuck for a good explanation until the right term came to him. "You and me… the centre."

"And the centre must hold," Bones said, nodding in understanding

"Right," Booth said; at least she understood that. "So, are we gonna hold?"

"Yeah," Bones said, smiling back at him. "We'll hold. We're the centre."

As he shook his partner's hand, Booth could only hope that this would work out; things were going to be difficult enough in this kind of case without them having to deal with personal issues on top of everything else…


	46. Soccer Mom in the Mini-Van

"Look, Bones," Booth said, as they got out of the car and approached the damaged minivan that was the scene of their latest case, "all I'm saying is that Caroline went through a lot of trouble to get you private visitation with your father, and now you don't want it?"

It was a difficult topic for his partner, but Booth felt that she needed to address it; considering his own continued guilt about his inability to ever repair his relationship with his father after what he'd done to his family after becoming Angelus, he didn't want his partner to have to deal with the same guilt later in life.

"The federal detention facility already has visiting areas," Bones said, putting on her gloves as they walked.

"Yeah, behind two-inch glass," Booth pointed out, leaning over to squeeze her arms. "Now you'll be able to give your old man a hug."

"I didn't ask for special treatment, Booth," Bones responded.

"That's because you don't have to because you _are_ special," Booth said, before turning his attention to the damaged car before them; if Bones wasn't willing to talk about this now, he'd re-focus her attention on the case and get back to that issue later. "And you are gonna tell me- whoa- what happened to whatever the hell is melted to that steering wheel and everything else."

"Female," Bones said, ignoring the arms still attached to the steering wheel as she examined other parts around the chair. "Mid 40's to late 50's. Pelvis indicates she's given birth."

"Hey, Bones, look at that," Booth said, indicating a finger with a ring on it. "Married, right?"

"Wedding ring… possibility," Bones said, briefly looking over at another FBI agent and directing him towards a leg in a nearby tree before she started talking to him even as she walked around the car. "Why do you care about my relationship with my father, Booth? You were only too happy to arrest him and put him in prison."

"Alright, look, Bones…" Booth said, wishing his partner would stop talking about his role in her father's arrest; he'd had less trouble getting the Scoobies to accept him after his resurrection, and Angelus had actually tried to _kill_ them. "Ya know what, it's not about being happy, OK? It's about doing my job."

"Do we know if it was a bomb that caused the explosion?" Bones asked, her attention focused back on the car.

"Well, let's see," Booth said, leaning over to look at her through the damaged vehicle. "The roof is peeled back and the doors-"

"I was talking to him," Bones said, indicating another agent crouched at the front of the car, who stood up as the anthropologist clarified who she was addressing.

"We found explosive residue all over the van and metal fragments in the bushes," the other agent replied.

"What is that?" Booth asked, indicating the evidence bags the agent was hold. "Pipe bomb?"

"I can't really be sure until the explosives unit gets the van back to the lab," the other agent clarified.

"No, they can't have the van," Bones said, standing back up to look firmly at the agent. "There are remains seared all over the inside of the vehicle and they can't be compromised."

"I have to call-" the other agent began.

"This van will be brought to the Jeffersonian; your bomb techs can look at it there," Bones said firmly.

"I'll… make the call?" the agent said, clearly recognising the futility of arguing his case further.

"That's- that's alright; you go make that call," Booth said, stuck for anything else to say to apologise for his partner's harsh comments as he patted the agent briefly on the back before turning back to the anthropologist. "Bones, come on; you're a little harsh there, maybe you want to talk it out?"

"Look, Booth," Bones said, evidently not listening to him as she carefully lifted a necklace from the car.

"It's a locket," Booth said, his sympathy for the victim growing as Bones opened the small object to reveal a picture of a little girl inside it. "Ugh, probably her daughter."

"Who would want to blow up a soccer mom?" Bones said, studying the photograph in confusion.

Booth wasn't sure of the answer to that question yet, but he was already fairly sure that the victim would turn out to be more than that; traditional soccer moms did _not_ attract the kind of enemies who'd do something like this…

* * *

  
"This tattoo appears to have been crudely executed," Angela said, lines flashing around on the screen in front of them as the computer tried to recreate the tattoo that was the current focus of their investigation.

"You mean like a prison tat?" Booth suggested.

"No record of her being in prison," Cam noted.

"In Russia, prisoners made tattoo ink by burning the heel of a shoe and mixing it with soot and urine," Hodgins commented.

"This was a ball point pen, rigged with a sewing needle, pushed down so deep it penetrated her periosteum," Bones interjected; whether she wanted to correct Hodgins or was just stating a fact, Booth wasn't sure.

"You mean bone," Booth said, smiling at the opportunity to show that he'd learned something from their time together.

"Doesn't seem like a very soccer mom thing to do," Cam noted.

"And… here we go," Angela said, preventing anyone responding to Cam's comment as the computer finished the rendering, revealing an upside-down pentagram with smaller lines constantly shifting inside it.

"An inverted pentagram?" Cam said in surprise. "Devil worship?"

"Mom had a little thing going on the side with Satan?" Hodgins said, smiling wistfully at the sight. "Oh, the burbs…"

"There's a design in the centre that I can't quite get…" Angela noted.

"Wait, wait, wait," Hodgins said, moving up to the computer to tap a few keys as the image settled into a vague shape that looked like a malformed circle with bits sticking out of it. "Is that a fist?"

"A fist?" Bones asked.

"A fist," Booth confirmed; now that Hodgins suggested it, the image _did_ look like a clenched fist…

"Yeah," Angela noted, as the image rearranged itself into a more obvious fist. "Oh my God; it is a fist."

"So she wasn't Satan's old lady," Hodgins commented with a smile. "She was in the NLA."

"NLA?" Angela asked.

"National Liberation Army," Booth clarified; he'd encountered a couple of their protests when he having his better period in that decade, but he'd stopped paying attention to anything newsworthy after the doughnut shop incident.

"Student radicals in the seventies," Hodgins elaborated, as he brought up a web page detailing the NLA manifesto. "Thought they could change the world. Set off bombs in army recruiting offices, torched cop cars-"

"Yeah, real visionaries," Booth noted. "They also shot and killed a cop in '75."

"That was the burglary," Hodgins said, bringing up a black-and-white image of a man and a woman side-by-side. "They broke into house of a defense contractor to rip off his safe; said it was the people's money. Here. June Harris and her boyfriend, Neil Watkins, were charged with the murder, but never found."

"The FBI's been looking for them for thirty years," Booth added.

"And there they are," Cam said.

"And our victim?" Angela said, pulling up a picture of Junes Harris and comparing it to the photograph of Amy Nash that Hodgins had just brought up. "It's the same woman."

"So our soccer mom… was a killer," Bones said, staring at the screen in her usual neutral manner.

Booth wasn't sure how to feel about that; they didn't even know what June had done with herself since the days when she'd been involved in that murder, and now she was automatically being judged as a murderer as though that crime was all that mattered.

If Bones reacted like that to a stranger- to say nothing of her simple condemnation of her own father- how would she react if she learned what _he_ had once been? Give him a chance to explain his side of things, or just condemn him as a killer and leave it at that?

* * *

  
"Does not make any sense," Sam said, walking alongside him and Bones as they discussed Zack's latest discovery of a bullet-wound in the victim's shoulder. "The van was rigged to blow up; why shoot her?"

"Well, until we see what ballistics determines, it's absurd to speculate," Bones pointed out.

"Speculating's kinda what we do here," Sam countered.

"Listen," Booth said, not wanting to endure the two of them getting into a debate about their differing methods of investigation as he led the way to his office, "Danny Valenti is a cop, June Harris murdered his father, he has a gun."

"He's a good kid, Booth," Sam said firmly. "He didn't do it."

"But this is meaningless speculation," Bones countered, nearly crashing into Booth as he turned around after picking up a file from his desk.

"Is she really necessary?" Sam asked, as Booth walked past him to leave the office.

"She's my partner," Booth said.

"Mentors often feel threatened when their students surpass them," Bones suddenly interjected.

"Bones!" Booth said, wishing she wouldn't bring up such a relatively pointless topic; he wasn't trying to upstage Sam and Sam wasn't trying to put him down like he'd suddenly taken Spike's place in the old rivalry he'd always had with the _other_ vampire with a soul (Besides, even if his partner was even partially correct, it wasn't the same at all; his and Spike's own issues were partly based around Spike's attempts to surpass his own achievements, whether based on his actions as Angelus or as Angel, rather than the possibility that Sam _might_ resent seeing someone he trained moving beyond him).

"Well, it's true, Booth," Bones said, once again ignorant of his attempt to change the subject. "Change can be difficult to accept whether it comes in the form of a revolutionary or the simple passage of time."

"If she was a guy, I'd deck her," Sam practically growled at Booth as he indicated Bones.

"Well, you know, that distinction is no longer necessary, but I wouldn't recommend it," Bones began, leaving Booth to push her into the interrogation room while Sam was sent to the observation room; this situation would be complicated enough without them arguing like that…

* * *

  
"What's taking Hodgins so long?" Booth asked, looking out from the balcony as Bones approached him with a cup of coffee; one thing he missed about demon-hunting was the ability to just identify the demon's likely location based on species habits and then go straight there, rather than having to wait around for useful information based on whatever might have been left lying around.

"It's an exacting process," Bones said, as she handed him the coffee.

"Thank you," Booth said, taking the offered mug, deciding to tackle something less case-related as he looked at his partner. "So, um, how did your dad like his socks?"

"Fine," Bones said, declining to make any further comments.

"That's sorta a way to start a conversation there, Bones," Booth said, after confirming that she wasn't going to say anything on her own.

"I know," Bones said, which at least assured him that her social development hadn't taken a step back but didn't help him determine why she wasn't saying anything else.

"Ya know, look," Booth said, suddenly feeling really awkward about his role in this conversation; he was starting to feel like he was repeating his mistakes with Darla, projecting his own desires to repair something onto someone else to make up for his inability to do something himself. "I'm- I should never have gotten in the middle of all this, I'm- I'm sorry. I was just- I'm just trying to help."

"He wanted me to testify on his behalf," Bones said. "He just wants to use me."

"Well, he's a con man, Bones," Booth replied. "That doesn't mean that he doesn't love you; he's just… looking for a little payback."

"Payback?" Bones repeated.

"Yeah," Booth clarified, already thinking of the best way to say that so that Max didn't sound like a complete jerk. "He's thinking that he got arrested so that he could spend some more time with you. I mean, you could at least return the favor by doing something nice for him."

"I'm not sure I want a father who's always keeping score," Bones protested.

"Yeah," Booth said, looking thoughtfully at her. "Sounds like you are too."

"You know what?" Bones said after a moment's silence, the last comment having clearly touched a nerve. "You're right; that is none of your business."

"You know what, Bones?" Booth retorted, resolved not to take that counter seriously; Bones was just hurt and lashing out the way she always did when things became emotionally uncomfortable. "You're never gonna forgive yourself if you don't cut the guy some slack just because you're afraid to get hurt."

Bones's comment about Hodgins taking so long was a very abrupt method of ending the conversation, but Booth decided to allow her the opportunity; he'd made his point, and clearly it was enough to get her thinking.

* * *

  
"You told Reilly where Watkins is?" Bones asked, as they drove towards the destination that Hodgins had identified as their suspect's likely location.

"Yeah; he's meeting us there," Booth replied, attention focused on the road.

"He's too emotional," Bones said.

"This is his case," Booth retorted. "He's invested."

"He's irrational," Bones replied. "Probably male menopause-"

"What?" Booth interjected, unable to believe that Bones was resorting to that kind of argument. "He's a good man, and… you know what? There's no such thing; that is a sexist myth."

"Factually, hormone production drops in your fifties," Bones said. "Sexual desire decreases. You have to deal with the reduction of muscle mass, erectile dysfunction-"

"Hey, alright, hey," Booth interrupted, far from ready to hear about that; the negative consequences of aging were something he'd only deal with when he had to and not before. "Let's just keep the conversation up, shall we?"

"And there's evidence that certain men become very unstable," Bones noted.

"Do you want me to start talking about your father again?" Booth asked, before she could get into that issue; he'd known that vampires had to deal with some psychological issues as they got older, but it was hard to know how much of that was due to them being soulless rather than anything naturally psychological.

"You're very testy," Bones noted.

"And thirty-five," Booth said (It still felt weird to be thinking about himself as being that relatively young, but he was never going to be believed if he started announcing that he was nearly three hundred; easier to approximate based on his new birth certificate and the age he'd been when he was turned). "I'm only thirty-five."

"OK, OK," Bones said, looking away from him.

"They have blue pills for that," he added as an afternote, stuck for anything else to say that wouldn't give away his real age or sound weird; he just hated to leave that kind of conversation without getting the last word in.

* * *

  
Looking at the letter that Amy/June had written for her daughter, Booth had to admit that he kind of admired the woman in question. Everything she'd written about the terrible things she'd done in her past, taking responsibility even for things she didn't _do_ simply because she'd participated in them, accepting the value of humanity rather than simply using force to solve every problem…

It reminded him of something he might have written for Connor if he had been able to raise his son himself but hadn't wanted to say it himself (He wasn't going to write an equivalent letter for Parker, however; the less Parker knew about his real past, the better); the content would have been quite different, but the central point was the same.

Looking solemnly at the letter, his eyes began to scan over it once again, considering what he was taking in…

_Dear Celia,  
_ _I've done terrible things in my life, things I can't change. I know how much pain this will cause you, but never forget how much I love you. I know we didn't always agree on how, but we both hope for the same thing, a just world.  
_ _Even though I didn't fire the gun that took that man's life, I have to take responsibility for it and for my cowardice, hiding all these years.  
_ _I tried to spare you and your father pain. I know what your father thought when he caught me going to see Neal, but I would rather die than betray your father.  
_ _If I've learned anything, it's that we can never let the chaos and injustice make us so blind with anger that we become part of the problem. Understanding, compassion, kindness and the only true revolutionary ideas. When we compromise those, we become what we despise and we lose our humanity. The world might see my legacy of one of violence and destruction, but I know that you are my real legacy and for that - I will be thankful every day._

It was an almost perfect reflection of his own feelings when it came to his guilt over his past crimes; he regretted his past, but he was determined to focus on the positives in the future, and his children would always be his real legacy, Connor for his life as Angel and Parker for what he'd accomplished as Seeley Booth.

"You know," Sam said, walking into his office with a bottle in one hand and a pair of glasses in the other, "I've kept this bottle of single malt on my desk since '75. I always said when we put this case to bed, I'd open it. I'd like you to help me with that, Booth."

"Listen, Sam," Booth said, walking over to take one of the offered glasses. "I want to apologise…"

"Hey, I would have done the same thing myself," Sam said, smiling reassuringly as he poured some of the bottle's contents into the two glasses. "Well, maybe not quite the same thing; I would have slapped me around a little bit."

Booth chucked slightly at that comment, prompting Sam to smile at him in return, old animosities forgotten; unlike Booth's old life, his colleagues here did _not_ hold grudges for centuries.

"To the changing of the guard," the older agent said solemnly.

As they clinked glasses and drank the scotch, Booth privately reflected that this was one part of being human he really enjoyed; the ability to enjoy a drink that would affect you without it costing someone else their life, putting an old conflict to bed with no possibility of it resurfacing later.


	47. Death in the Saddle

"I thought you had a name," Booth heard Cam say as he walked up to the examination table, Bones, Cam and Hodgins examining the current corpse with its missing feet and strange teeth.

"A name for what?" Booth asked, curious about the other details of the conversation he'd just walked in on.

"Angela's husband," Cam replied.

"Berimbau," Hodgins clarified. "But our private investigator says it's a nickname."

"Well, you can't get much off a nickname," Booth said (That was one reason he and Darla had taken new names after becoming vampires; it allowed them to get away from their pasts as humans, even if there hadn't been much left from that time when they'd risen from their graves).

"Berimbau is a little flute," Bones noted. "Brazilian."

"A little flute?" Booth repeated after a moment's contemplative thought, looking sceptically at Bones as Hodgins and Cam grinned at the news.

"Suddenly filled with a sense of... well-being," Hodgins said, smiling at the possibility.

"The jury's out on the efficacy and validity of recovered memories," Bones commented, unaware that she was cutting Hodgins' brief hope short as Cam began to examine the corpse's organs.

"That's great," Booth said, trying to get the conversation back where it belonged as he opened the current file. "Speaking of names, I, uh, ran the vic's prints and got a hit; Ed Milner from Maryland."

"The shiny substance you found on the victim's nose and mouth?" Hodgins added, evidently with his own information to contribute to the discussion. "It's sunscreen. Per the manufacturer, it protects and maintains the natural colour of coats, manes and tails."

"Coats, manes, and tails," Booth said; he wasn't certain where this conversation was going, but it was starting to sound like the case was about to get somewhat strange. "Oh my."

"Formulated for horses," Hodgins added.

"Any human applications?" Bones asked.

"Manufacturer recommends _against_ use on human skin," Hodgins confirmed.

"Guys?" Cam said, as she began removing particles from what appeared to be the corpse's stomach. "Contents of the victim's stomach are corn… raw oats, and dried molasses."

"Horse food?" Booth said.

"FYI?" Cam said, staring in discomfort at the stomach contents. "There's such a thing as too much fibre."

"Alright," Bones said, analysing the X-rays on a nearby monitor as she enlarged an image of the victim's teeth. "I can draw inferences from multiple equine implications…"

"What?" Booth asked, suddenly concerned that there was actually something horselike about the corpse; the last thing he needed was an actual _demon_ to turn up on Bones's lab table…

"She's goin' along with the horsey thing," Hodgins clarified, which at least suggested that Bones hadn't noticed anything distinctly horse-like about the body.

"Incised wounds extending into the periosteum of the maxilla between the molars and pre-molars," Bones said.

"What?" Hodgins said, looking at her in confusion, which at least helped Booth feel less stupid at his own inability to understand what his partner had just said.

"His teeth and jaw show evidence of a bit," Bones said, prompting an amused chuckle from Hodgins as the others looked at him in confusion.

"His name is Ed," Hodgins said, which at least helped Booth realise what the joke was.

"Why is that funny?" Bones asked.

"As in a horse is a horse…" Cam began.

"Of course, of course," Booth and Hodgins said with her (Booth might not have watched much TV during his time as Angel, but some things were hard to miss).

"The famous Mr. Ed?" Booth said, looking prompting at Bones when the anthropologist still looked confused at what they were talking about.

"Mr Ed?" Bones said, still clearly confused.

That was one thing Booth secretly liked about working with Bones; he wasn't the socially ignorant one when it came to modern popular culture any more…

* * *

  
"So, you say you're with the FBI?" the proprietor of the Ambassadora Bed & Breakfast said- a man with the unusual name of 'Lucky', apparently- staring unhelpfully at them even as Booth held up his badge again.

"That is the third time he's shown you his ID," Bones said.

"Why would I know this man?" Lucky asked, evidently deciding that it was easier to ignore that statement.

"Because we have his credit card history and you're a part of it?" Booth said.

"Sir, why are you being so difficult?" Bones asked.

"Not difficult," Lucky corrected, as a guest walked past. "Discreet."

"What do you do?" Booth asked pointedly. "Run a service for cheating husbands?"

"Call in the SWAT team; they're anything but discreet," Bones said.

"O-OK," Lucky said, shaking his head. "OK; that's Mr Ed."

"A horse is a horse, of course, of course?" Bones asked.

"That's the general idea, yes…" Lucky said, looking awkwardly around before he came to a decision. "Come with me, please."

With nothing else to do to get further in this case, Booth and Bones followed Lucky into a lounge area just next to the reception.

"The Ambassadora is a place where people come to indulge in pony play fantasy twenty-four hours a day without fear of judgement," Lucky explained. "Mr. Ed? Is a pony."

"Is this some kind of a sex thing?" Booth asked, seizing on the obvious details of what he'd just heard.

"How'd you get there so quickly?" Bones asked.

"The man said 'fantasy'," Booth said. "I just made the leap."

"Ed took off a couple of days ago," Lucky continued. "Which was odd, since he'd prepaid."

"Prepaid for what?" Booth asked.

"Oh!" Lucky said, as though he hadn't realised that he'd missed mentioning it earlier. "We're, uh, we're in the middle of what you might call our... convention. So unless this is really important... I'd rather not disturb our guests."

"Well," Booth said, resolved not to think about the 'convention' angle until he had to, "two miles from here, in the woods, Mr Ed was found dead."

Lucky apparently needed a moment to confirm the sincerity of that statement, but once he was satisfied that it was true, he turned and led them into another part of the hotel. As they walked into an even larger large room inside the Ambassadora, Booth tried not to feel too disturbed at the sight of a group of half-naked people dressed in overly-sexualised jockey costumes leading around a bunch of people dressed as BDSM-style horses, the 'horses' eating from a trough while the 'riders' sat at a table eating more conventional meals.

"Wow," Booth said, stuck for what else to say at the sight before him; he was used to thinking of fetishes as something private, even if he knew that people were more willing to be public about that kind of thing in the modern world. "What's goin' on here?"

"It's a fetish," Bones clarified.

"So… the idea here is that one of them is the horse and the other one is the rider?" Booth asked, wanting to be sure they were all on the same page as the ones in the ears crouch down beside a trough.

"Basically," Lucky said.

"Well, this isn't about the horses," Bones said, as the 'jockeys' moved over to eat at a more conventional table. "It's about a dominant versus submissive balance of power, a variation on sado-masochism."

"Those people are eating from troughs…" Booth said, stuck on that twisted part of the dynamic in front of him before he looked at his partner. "Do you think that's sexy?"

"Fetishism is a way of indulging in sexual activity, without actually engaging emotionally with the other person as a fully formed human being," Bones clarified.

"OK, sex is all about engaging," Booth countered. "You don't wanna engage, you just stay home, and... you know."

"Well, they have masturbation fetishes," Bones said. "Often involving women's shoes or undergarments-"

"Uh, can we just talk to Mr. Ed's mistress, dominatrix...whatever?" Booth asked, not wanting to explore that issue any more than he had to; he'd had more than enough Dom/Sub crap to deal with when he was a vampire, mostly involving Angelus forcing people to have sex with him or he'd kill them (He'd enjoyed making them do it that way more than just straightforwardly raping his target; it had appealed to his ego more).

"I'm gonna have to talk to a few people, and ask permission to out them," Lucky began. "We have three lawyers, half a dozen doctors-"

"Excuse me?" Bones interjected, raising her voice to address the riders, displaying her usual disregard for protocol. "We need to speak to Mr. Ed's groom. Whoever… rode him last?"

"That's a great way to cut to the chase there, Bones, OK?" Booth said, stepping forward to flash his badge; his partner had started it, so he might as well focus on adding some authority to her request. "Alright, FBI… and sir, could you turn your behind around so it's… behind?"

As the aforementioned bare-backed horse was led away by a woman in a short leather skirt and a sparkling sports bra, one of the female riders looking at them in a slightly apprehensive manner, Booth sincerely hoped this case wouldn't take too long; he knew that it wasn't the same as what he'd done as Angelus, but this kind of behaviour just creeped him out now that he was human…

* * *

  
"What's worse?" Booth asked, as he and Bones drove away from the Ambassadora, his partner studying a pamphlet she'd picked up about the hotel. "Finding out that your spouse is having an affair, or finding out that he has a secret life as a pony?"

"Pony fetishism has been around since the Greeks," Bones noted.

"Had to have been the wife, right?" Booth said, not wanting to consider where that kind of fetish might have originated back then; the role of demons in civilisation's historical development was something that Willow and Wesley had speculated on at times without ever coming to a decent conclusion on…

"Aristotle extolled the joys of being ridden like a horse," Bones pointed out.

"Aristotle also thought that the purpose of the human heart was to solve math problems," Booth countered.

"I'm surprised you know that," Bones said.

"Well, turns out I'm smarter than a fifth grader," Booth replied, chuckling at the slight joke even if he knew his partner wouldn't get it.

"And in Victorian England, scantily-clad women put on erotic shows dressed as ponies," Bones continued, evidently deciding that it would be easier to continue the original discussion than get started on that one.

"Just saying," Booth said (He thought Angelus had attended one of those shows, but he wouldn't like to swear to it; his murders were always vivid in his nightmares, but Angelus had done a few things that Booth didn't think about simply because he didn't like the memories), "wife sees some woman in a harness rubbing her husband down, while he's nibbling on oats? That's harsh."

"And in sixteenth century Turkey, the king kept stables of pony-girls and pony-boys for his pleasure," Bones added; Booth wasn't sure if she was even listening to him at this point.

"OK, king of Turkey was a freak," he said

"Why are you being so judgemental?" Bones asked.

"When you turn someone into an object of sexual pleasure, it's wrong," Booth said firmly; he'd done that often enough as Angelus that he was never comfortable with the appeal of BDSM as a lifestyle, even if it wasn't the same thing when humans did it as they generally weren't going to kill them in the end.

"How do you know?" Bones asked.

"It says so in the Bible," Booth said; he wasn't going to go into that aspect of his personal history right now.

"It does not!" Bones protested.

"Then it got left out by mistake," Booth corrected himself.

"We are all hard-wired differently," Bones said. "If someone needs to shout 'Giddyup' to heighten arousal...what's wrong with that?"

"Maybe if Ed lived like a man, he wouldn't have died like a horse," Booth said. "That's all."

He wouldn't normally make that kind of statement about a victim's lifestyle, but when it had an obvious bearing on his death, he felt comfortable making an exception to that 'rule'; this guy's demise had been clearly linked to his horseplay lifestyle.

* * *

  
"You recognise that?" Booth asked, showing the recently-discovered twine to the hotel proprietor as they sat in the interrogation room.

"Yeah," Lucky replied. "That'd be twine."

"Yeah," Booth said. "Fairly specialised stuff, huh? Doesn't deteriorate in the sun... only the best for your pony clients."

"Got it off one of my hay bales?" Lucky asked, picking up the bag after Booth dropped it on the table in front of him.

"Got it off the corpse of Ed Milner," Booth corrected.

"Do I need a lawyer?" Lucky asked.

"That's your call," Booth said; lawyering up wasn't evidence of guilt, but it did suggest something to hide.

"I didn't kill Ed," Lucky said, in a direct manner that at least suggested he was being honest.

"We traced the owner of that twine to the Ambassadora Ranch," Booth said.

"Any of my guests could have taken this twine off my hay bales," Lucky pointed out.

"Your company used to be co-owned by your ex-wife 'til recently?" Booth asked.

"I paid her off in the divorce," Lucky pointed out.

"Yeah, your ex-wife being Anne Marie Ostenback?" Booth asked, glad that he'd gone over the paperwork before coming in; his memory was good, but it was always best to keep the details fresh at a time like this. "Rider named Annie Oakley? Ed Milner's sex partner, you can see how things are starting to line up against you here, Lucky."

"We aren't married any more," Lucky said.

"You're gonna tell me that it doesn't bother you to see your ex-wife playing sex games with other men?" Booth asked.

He almost didn't need an answer to that one; he and Buffy had known that it could never work- he'd left her so that she could _have_ a normal relationship- and it had still killed him when he'd run into Riley during his return to Sunnydale after that whole mess with Faith…

"What's that?" Lucky asked, as Booth focused his thoughts back on the case and showed Lucky another piece of paper.

"It's a warrant," he said simply.

"I already told you, I've got that twine all over the ranch," Lucky said.

"We'll be looking for a hoof knife," Booth continued.

"I've got a hoof knife," Lucky admitted.

"Great!" Booth said.

"But it was stolen," Lucky added. "Four days ago, from my truck."

"Did you report the theft?" Booth asked.

"Come on, like the cops are gonna care about a ten dollar knife?" Lucky replied with what Booth had to concede was a fair point; if nothing else had been taken there wasn't enough to attract police attention. "Think I know who did it, though."

"I'm listening," Booth said, his tone calm as he waited to hear what the suspect had to say.

"I have a rider client named Tom Mularz," Lucky explained. "Couple days ago he starts passing out fliers advocating the consumption of horse meat. But, what do you expect? He's a butcher."

"Why'd he break in your truck?" Booth asked; he wasn't about to get into the issue of why a butcher would get involved in this lifestyle until the more immediate concerns had been dealt with.

"Well, I took the fliers from him, I tossed them in the truck, and I kicked him out of the convention," Lucky replied.

"So he took back the fliers and the hoof knife?" Booth concluded.

"I dunno," Lucky said. "All I know is I came out the next morning, the fliers were gone, so was the knife… That is the same morning that Ed Milner was missing!"

"Wow," Booth said, taking in Lucky's apparent surprise at this realisation. "You just figured that out."

His patronising shake of the head was a slight exaggeration- in a busy group like that, you might take a while to realise that one person was missing if you had no reason to single anyone out- but he wasn't in the mood to cut potential suspects a break until they'd been completely ruled out.

* * *

  
"How's that salad?" Booth asked, as they sat in the diner with the case concluded, free to discuss lighter matters with the murder solved.

"There are many health benefits to being vegetarian," Bones replied. "It's a rational choice in a world where food supplies... are affected by global warming issues."

"What about global taste issues?" Booth countered; he could get the argument for vegetarianism, but he wasn't going to limit his tastebuds after years of only being able to really 'taste' blood.

"Is that meat sweet, rich, super-lean, and soft?" Bones asked, the resulting image immediately costing Booth his appetite.

"What, does it taste like horse meat?" he said, remembering that flyer they'd seen in Tom Mularz's butcher shop.

"Maybe you should consider going vegetarian too," Bones suggested.

"I didn't lose my appetite because you mentioned horse meat," Booth clarified. "I lost my appetite because you made me think about all those people parading around, pretending to be something they aren't, just so they could have crappy sex."

"How do you know it's crappy?" Bones asked.

"Gotta be, Bones," Booth said. "Come on, it's gotta be!"

"Why?" Bones asked.

"Why?" Booth replied, leaning forward towards his partner. "I'll tell you why. Here we are. All of us are basically alone, separate creatures just circling each other, all searching for that slightest _hint_ of a real connection. Some look in the wrong places. Some, they just give up hope because in their mind they're thinking 'Oh, there's nobody out there for me'," he couldn't help but think of Zack as he sat alone in the lab that night, "but all of us, we keep trying over, and over again." He thought of Cam, leaving to prepare for a new date. "Why? Because every once in a while, every once in a while, two people meet."

It might have been years since he'd even been in the same room as Buffy, but he still remembered how it had been all those years ago when he'd first seen her outside her high school, hiding in the car as he began his first tentative steps to make something of himself, and her own uncertain reaction to when she'd first seen _him_ …

"And there's that spark," he continued, looking encouragingly at his partner; maybe Angela and Hodgins' example would help her realise just what he was talking about right now. "And yes Bones, he's handsome, and she's beautiful, and maybe that's all they see at first... But making love? Making. Love. _That's_ when two people become one."

"It is…" Bones began hesitantly, "scientifically impossible for two objects to occupy the same space."

"Yeah, but what's important is we try," Booth said, smiling at the memory of when he'd come that close. "And when we do it right… we get close."

"To what?" Bones asked. "Breaking the laws of physics?"

"Yeah, Bones," Booth confirmed. "A miracle. Those people- role-playing and their fetishes and their little sex games… It's crappy sex. Well, at least compared to the real thing."

He might have only fantasised about having sex with Cordelia, but when it had been her and Buffy, all he'd needed was the knowledge that he was with them to make it incredible (And OK, the fantasy with Cordelia had included so many other thing to inspire the 'perfect happiness'; he'd been having a particularly rough year on a personal level at the time).

"You're right," Bones said.

"Yeah, but-" Booth began automatically before he processed what she'd said. "Wait a second, I just won that argument?"

"Yup," Bones replied, smiling back at him before she turned back to her food.


	48. The Secret in the Soil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to mention in advance, I had to take a bit of creative license for the suspect interviews and assume that Charlie Rogan's took place before Kat Curtis's for my chosen structure of the interview to make sense; hope nobody minds.

"It's some kind of personality test," Bones noted, as she studied the paperwork they'd just received from Doctor Lance Sweets, who was the new psychologist the Bureau had assigned to 'analyse' their relationship.

"I can't believe he gave us _homework_ ," Booth said, wishing he could better express his indignation; with them driving at the moment, he wasn't able to express his indignation as much as he would have liked. "You know, this is probably his; what kind of kid works on Saturday night?"

"Oh, that's my fault," Bones said, looking up from her sheet (How could she actually _do_ that in the dark in a moving vehicle?). "I told him I wasn't available during the week."

"Whoa, whoa, why'd you go and do that?" Booth said, looking over at his partner indignantly. "You know, I had- I had seats right behind the dugout!"

It was a small thing, but after so long unable to attend so many sporting events because they took place outside in daylight, he really appreciated the chance to feel the thrill of a game during the day…

He was almost grateful when they got a call about a new dead body to distract them from their work; why did official organisations always feel this need to show that they were doing things 'properly' by assigning all this unnecessary self-analysis crap…?

God, he survived _Hell_ and got his faculties back on his own after that particular nightmare was over- even if he acknowledged that his repression of his memories of that time wasn't exactly healthy- and now he had to go through therapy because he arrested his partner's father?

He could understand them thinking that Bones might need therapy, but they'd lasted a couple of months with the only issue being her annoyance over him convincing Zack to leave; this wasn't the same thing…

* * *

  
"I'm just saying the guy had a point," Booth noted, as they drove away from their most recent interview with their current suspect; with nothing available to take them further on the case, he had time to discuss something he wouldn't normally consider. "If pesticides are so bad for us, then how come people live longer now than they did before they used pesticides?"

"You're over-simplifying an enormously complex issue…" Bones countered.

"Meaning you don't have a good answer," Booth said, smiling slightly at his partner's inability to contradict him.

"The arguments in favor of organic farming aren't just about food safety," Bones protested. "They're about prevention of soil erosion, protection of water quality, carbon emissions from shipping, not to mention…"

"Whatever," Booth interjected (Food was _really_ complicated these days; it had been so much simpler as Liam when you either grew your own or bought it in the town, and Angel/Angelus had naturally had a fairly limited diet even if he'd learned how to cook to be a better host for his friends). "You know what? You're not going to see me paying four dollars for a tomato."

"You know," Bones said, after a moment's silence, "a researcher at the University of Florida proved that alligators who swim in pesticide contaminated waters have smaller genitalia than their clean-water counterparts."

"No way," Booth said, surprised at both the fact and his partner's ability to provide some form of evidence that wasn't bone-related.

"Way," Bones responded.

It might be an alligator rather than a human being, but that still raised some _very_ disturbing questions about the pesticides…

* * *

  
"Frank Curtis's wife stood to gain the most from her husband's death," Booth reflected as he and Bones walked through the hothouse. "If she found out he was cheating..."

"But you said her alibi is solid," Bones pointed out, walking to examine one side of the hothouse interior as Booth walked along the other, separated by a row of planted pineapples.

"That doesn't mean we can't, you know, double check," Booth said, continuing to search for a time before he looked up as another thought came to him. "I bet Sweets was picked on all through school."

"And that's relevant now, why?" Bones asked.

"You're kidding me, right?" Booth said. "Scrawny kid like that sees me coming, a former jock, and he's thinking to himself, 'Time for a little payback', you know? Make him fill out all those stupid forms, threatens to take my partner away from me…"

It might sound petty, but if his time interacting with Willow and Xander back in Sunnydale had taught him anything, it was that even good people could be petty when it came to school rivalries; Harmony (During one of her awkward attempts to 'bond with the boss') had mentioned this one occasion where Willow had tricked her and Cordelia into deleting their schoolwork, and some of Xander's childhood pranks- or at least some of the things he'd _talked_ about doing; Angel naturally couldn't be sure if he'd ever done them- had been somewhat childish no matter how you looked at them…

"These tubs are too small to fit anything," Bones said; evidently his partner wasn't interested in discussing this particular topic, and he supposed he couldn't blame her for that; his assessment of Sweets probably wasn't something she could legitimately contribute to.

"We're not going to find the second victim here."

"Yeah, you know what, you're right," Booth said in acknowledgement, before a strong scent reached his nostrils. "So what do you say we go check… Bones, was that you?"

It was an unusual way to divert the conversation but Booth felt it worked; he was fairly sure that it was too strong to be attributed to any human being, but further conversation on the topic of Sweets's paperwork couldn't go further without Booth lying about his background more than he wanted to.

* * *

  
"Don't look at me like that," Noel Liftin said as he sat opposite Booth in the interrogation room, after Booth had spent the first few moments of their meeting staring in silence. "You can't arrest me for renting a motel room. I didn't break any laws. I followed her, OK? But the motel room is over a hundred and fifty feet from Emma's apartment building. I measured."

"Then I guess I got no reason to suspect you," Booth said; it went without saying that anyone who was that precise about the distance between rooms couldn't be trusted regarding the safety of the person he was stalking. "I mean, you were just keeping an eye on her."

"I was," Noel said insistently.

"Yeah," Booth said neutrally.

"Frank Curtis," Noel said urgently.

"Who?" Booth said, feigning ignorance of who he was talking about.

"Frank Curtis," Noel repeated.

"Frank Curtis," Booth repeated grimly.

"You should talk to him, OK," Noel said. "He treated Emma like he owned her. It was so messed up. Wow, the reflections on this table, the patterns are beautiful…"

"Noel, focus," Booth said, knocking on the table; he wasn't sure if Noel was on something or just weird, but he wasn't here to discuss the artistic merits of the table. "Frank Curtis."

"Oh, sure," Noel said. "Frank comes in for one of his regional visits, you know, and has the manager hire Emma. The next time he comes in, he can see that Emma's falling for me. So he has me fired and then tells Emma to take out a restraining order."

"Oh, and the fact that you called her twenty times a day and slept in her driveway, that had nothing to do with it?" Booth pointed out; honestly, it was amazing how people could justify the most twisted behaviour…

"I guess you've never been in love," Noel said, leaving Booth with unpleasant memories of his encounter with James; the way that guy had turned himself into an indestructible kamikaze attacker just to avenge his lover and then had the nerve to claim that he'd truly lived because he _couldn't_ live without Elizabeth…

He didn't think Noel was that kind of obsessed- the guy seemed more pathetic than violent- but when people started using love to justify their actions, Booth felt he had every right to be concerned given his past history.

"Where were you last Wednesday and Thursday?" he said, focusing the questions on what actually mattered.

"Mostly I just stay in my motel room, you know, keep an eye on Emma's building," Noel said. "Only times I ever leave is to go out and sell my products."

"Your products?" Booth repeated.

"Hemp oil-based body products," Noel clarified, smiling slightly. "I make them myself."

"There's a surprise," Booth said, standing up and walking for the door. "I guess you're telling me you don't have an alibi."

The lack of response was more than enough of an answer for Booth at this time; he just didn't know where he was going to go with it.

The guy looked good as a suspect, but would someone that fixated on proclaiming his love have really murdered someone in such a manner and then disposed of the body like that?

* * *

  
"My father promised he'd stop fooling around," Kat Curtis protested as she sat in the interview room, her entire manner making it clear that she was barely holding it together as she spoke. "My mother was so humiliated."

"So you went to Emma," Bones said.

"I had the key," Kat admitted. "I was waiting for her. I scared her, I guess."

"And you fought," Booth said, keeping his tone neutral; the woman was clearly upset already, so a confrontational attitude wouldn't get him anywhere.

"She fell," Kat confirmed, as her sobs increased. "I never meant to hurt her. I just… I wanted my dad to end things. It just looked like she bumped her head."

"But she was dead," Bones said.

"I called Charlie for help, I told him it was an accident…" Kat said tearfully. "He said he'd get rid of the body… but he left something behind, and then…"

"And then Charlie stabbed your father with a pitchfork by accident when they confronted each other," Booth said grimly, recalling what that particular interview had revealed. "So why did you have Charlie move the body?"

"For my mom," Kat clarified. "For the insurance."

"Of course," Booth said, nodding in understanding; this explanation went all the way back to Agatha Christie. "No payout without a body."

"So Charlie put the body where he knew someone would find it," Bones concluded.

"Dad left everything to nonprofits," Kat said firmly. "That insurance money was all my mom would have."

"You did it for your mother?" Bones asked, evidently wanting clarification.

"I never meant for any of this to happen," Kat said, still struggling with her emotions. "I never meant to hurt anyone, I just...I wanted my mom to be happy."

"Kat…" Bones said, leaning forward to look sympathetically at the younger girl. "Your father wasn't having an affair with Emma. He'd had a relationship with her mother a long time ago. Emma Billings was his daughter. She was… your half sister."

As Kat degenerated into subs of grief and denial, Booth could only stare silently at her.

He'd killed his own family in the past, but this wasn't the same thing; Angelus hadn't cared when he'd killed Kathy and his parents, and what he'd done to Connor had been the only action he could take that would save Connor from the insanity he'd been trapped in, and he'd gone into action _knowing_ that he was dealing with his family.

What Kat had done had been a complete accident, even if it was a significant mistake; this was one of those frustrating cases where he almost hoped the murderer would get off, even if she was going to need a _lot_ of therapy…

* * *

  
"So," Sweets said, as the three of them sat in the psychiatrist's office later that evening, "case finished?"

"Yes," Bones said.

"Congratulations," the young doctor replied.

"Yeah," Booth said neutrally.

"You don't seem too happy," Sweets noted.

"Well," Booth said, "because sometimes, if you win, you end up with somebody else's pain and screwed-up life. You work for the FBI; you should know that."

"Must be a challenge for you to access those feelings," Sweets said, looking thoughtfully at him.

"OK, stop," Bones said, leaning forward to glare at Sweets. "You don't know Booth, you don't know me, you have a limited view of us based on superficial data you've accumulated on a standardized questionnaire, and a subjective analysis from talking to us that is not at all scientific, so back off."

"Just trying to help," Sweets said.

"By questioning his humanity?" Bones asked.

"OK, Bones, now you're going a little bit overboard," Booth said, smiling over at his partner; as much as he appreciated her defence, her getting angry right now wouldn't accomplish anything. "He's just a kid, right? I mean, the worst thing that's probably ever happened to him was he lost at _Mortal Kombat_."

"Are you normally this protective of him, Doctor Brennan?" Sweets asked, avoiding Booth's attempt to provoke anything.

"We are partners," Bones pointed out, as though it was obvious. "Our lives depend on being protective of each other."

"And you feel the same way, Agent Booth?" Sweets asked.

"Sweets," Booth said, "I can only hope that one day you know what a real partnership is."

"You two are very close," Sweets noted. "That was evident in your superficial, standardized questionnaire and my unscientific observations."

"Yeah?" Booth said.

"You complement each other," Sweets elaborated.

"No, she never compliments me…" Booth corrected, before he looked over at Bones. "Did you compliment me in the questionnaire?"

" 'Complement', not 'compliment'," Bones corrected. " _Ple_. He means that we complete each other, as a team."

"Yeah, right," Booth said, passing that issue off; he'd just meant it as a joke…

"Now," Sweets continued, "we've got a lot to work on over the next few months."

"Meaning we get to stay together?" Bones asked, exchanging a brief glance with Booth to ensure that they'd both heard him correctly.

"Yes," Sweets confirmed.

"I'm sensing a 'but'," Booth put in.

"However," Sweets continued.

"It's the same as 'but'," Bones noted in a similarly low voice.

"I have observed some underlying issues that need to be addressed," the psychiatrist continued.

"Issues?" Booth repeated.

"Yes," Sweets said. "There's clearly a very deep emotional attachment between you two."

"We're just partners," Booth said, falling back on the default line while resisting the urge to voice his real feelings; this guy seriously thought he had the right to just but in and start making deductions about their relationship based on a couple of meetings after they'd spent over _two years_ working together…

"And why do you think I would have thought otherwise?" Sweets asked.

"'Cause you're twelve," Booth countered (God, why did he always seem to degenerate to Xander's personality when he got defensive these days?).

"Don't read into anything that Booth said," Bones said. "We're professionals. There's a line that doesn't even need to be there."

"Not at all," Booth said, trying to reinforce his partner's point. "I mean, if there were no more murders, I would probably not even, you know, see her."

"That's very true," Bones said.

"Might have coffee," he noted; on reflection, that last statement would be taken as him being excessively dismissive of her.

"Probably not," Bones added.

"What?" Booth asked, unexpectedly hurt at the revelation.

"What?" Bones repeated.

"You wouldn't even have coffee with me?" he said, hoping he didn't come across as too pathetic; even after all the progress he'd made as Angel, the idea that someone he'd spent this much time with as Booth wouldn't want to talk with him if she didn't have to…

"Well, in your scenario, we wouldn't even know each other because there are no murders," Bones clarified.

" _Were_ ," Booth corrected, restraining his relief at the misunderstanding. "I said, 'no more murders'."

"Then fine," Bones. "I mean, we could have a coffee. So that's clear, then? I mean, we'd have coffee and that's our relationship? Coffee."

"Yeah, let's move on," Booth continued, already fully aware that they'd basically ruined their chance to claim that they had a purely professional relationship, even if he didn't agree with Sweets's view that they needed more sessions…


	49. Mummy in the Maze

"Clothes from this ministry were found on a dead body?" the pastor said as he led them through the thrift store attached to the local church. "Well, I'm afraid that happens fairly often."

"Why?" Bones asked.

"Because we're a charitable congregation," the pastor explained. "Homeless people know that we'll provide them with what they need."

"Do you, by any chance, remember these specific pieces of clothing?" Bones asked, showing various photographs on the clothing on their victim.

"This is from your murder victim?" the pastor asked, Bones nodding in confirmation.

"Pastor Jonas?" a younger boy said, walking up to the pastor before he could answer Bones's query, holding a black item of clothing that looked like a cloak (Booth had no idea how vampires had developed a reputation for that kind of attire; he wasn't sure if even _Dracula_ had ever dressed like that). "Do you have anything like this in red?"

"You're looking for something that screams 'Satan', right?" the pastor asked.

"Basically," the boy replied.

"I think we have a pink cape in the back," the pastor said thoughtfully. "Maybe we can dye it."

"What kind of church dresses kids like Satanists?" Booth asked, as the kid walked off to another part of the shop.

"Let me show you," the pastor said, walking over to a set of cardboard boxes laid out like a model house, filling with various models clearly intended to depict some of the sins of modern life. "At Halloween we do a Hell House; fornication, theft, murder, gambling, usury, sodomy, abortion."

"It's kind of horrific, isn't it?" Bones asked, looking uncertainly at the model (Personally, Booth wished people would stop considering fornication a sin; that was one issue he thought people were a bit too stringent about at times…)

"Well, abandoning the path of righteousness is horrific, Doctor Brennan," the pastor explained. "This is our way of remaking a pagan holiday, Halloween, into a positive celebration of Christian values; excellent prostitute, Stephanie," he added, nodding at a provocatively-dressed girl as she walked by him.

"Anyone ever dress like a mummy?" Booth asked, not wanting to touch on the issue of Hell any more than he had to; his time in Alcathla's dimension was more than enough in his book.

"We've never featured a 'false idol' room, though, now that you mention it, it's not a bad idea," the pastor noted.

"Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs endured for almost four thousand years, twice the length of Christianity," Bones pointed out.

"Look," Booth said, wanting to avoid that potential argument before it could develop further, "any of your kids suddenly disappear?"

"No," the pastor said.

"What if the children that you save from abortion grow up to be usurers and sodomites?" Bones asked.

"I don't respond to mocking semantics, Doctor Brennan," the pastor said firmly.

"Nor do I, but she's serious," Booth noted.

"In that case," the pastor said, clearly taken the question seriously, "my serious answer would be that in being given a chance to live a life, the aborted soul will have a multitude of opportunities to repent for their sins and live bathed in the Holy Spirit."

"Thank you," Bones said, nodding in acknowledgement .

"Thank you?" Booth repeated, looking at his partner in surprise; that was the first time he'd ever heard his partner thank someone for clarifying a religious point.

He wasn't sure if that was a good sign for her development, or something he should be concerned about…

* * *

  
As he walked through the 'Dungeon of 1000 Corpses'- why people wanted to give places designed for entertainment names like that, he really didn't understand- Booth tried not to jump at the sight of the killer clown right in front of the entrance; something about the clown's wrinkled skin and sharp teeth made him think of the Master with more obvious teeth, back when the guy's nose had been a little more distinctive than it was towards the end…

"What's wrong?" Bones asked, prompting Booth to jump in shock.

"Uh… the phone rang," he said, trying to defend his response; clowns made him uncomfortable, but he didn't want to give the impression that he was scared or anything stupid like that. "It's Cam on the phone; it's ringing."

"Coulrophobia," Bones said.

"Eh?" Booth asked.

"The fear of clowns," Bones explained with a slight smile. "Coulrophobia. May explain why you shot that clown last year."

"Look, I have no problem with clowns," Booth said, turning around slightly so that he wouldn't have to look at the statue in question (He didn't want to be reminded of that particular issue; the subsequent appointment was still a frustrating experience, even if Gordon Wyatt had been a decent enough guy). "I can stand right here; see?"

As Bones looked sceptically at him, Booth turned his attention back to the ringing phone and answered it; whatever Cam had to say, it couldn't be more awkward than this conversation…

" _We got an ID on our maze victim off of Angela's sketch_ ," Cam said.

"Great," Booth said. "Details to follow."

" _I think you want to hear this now_ ," Cam said, before he could turn off the phone. " _Name's Stella Higgins, fifteen years old, disappeared a year ago today_."

"What's she saying?" Bones asked, providing Booth with some small distraction from his increasing discomfort at that clown; something about that thing just creeped him out…

"ID and date of disappearance of our maze victim," he answered, looking briefly at Bones before continuing to listen to Cam.

" _Booth, Stella was last seen at Shoreline Amusement Park_ ," Cam continued.

"Wow!" Booth said.

"What wow?" Bones asked.

"More coincidences," Booth explained, thanking Cam as he ended the call before looking back at Bones. "The maze victim disappeared from here. So we just go right past the clown; I can walk right past the clown, like she said. Just right…"

The moment when he jumped away from the clown as it started to move probably undermined his confident appearance, but there really wasn't much that he could do about that; years of being on-edge around things that looked that distorted didn't go away easily, and he was particularly paranoid now that he was human and less equipped to cope with anything they might throw at him…

"Torture dungeon," Bones noted as they walked through another part of the haunted house, the anthropologist letting out an 'evil laugh' as the speakers let out tortured screams.

"Yeah, OK," Booth said. "Clown scary; not you."

As they reached the 'torture chamber' where the corpse had allegedly been discovered, Booth was almost grateful to be in more familiar territory; he might not be the death expert that his partner was, but he'd been around (and created) enough corpses in his time as Angel and Angelus to know when he was dealing with real or fake bodies, and most of these were definitely false; one corpse lying impaled in a chair even had an old ping-pong ball for an eye…

The mood was broken when Bones found the genuine corpse, but Booth was actually grateful for that; anything that would get them out of this disturbing place was good news in his book.

* * *

  
"Registered sex offender," Booth said, slamming a mugshot of their current suspect down on the table in front of the suspect in question as he sat opposite Booth. "Present at two places where the remains of young girls were found."

"Coincidence," Gregg replied, leaning back casually in his chair.

"Statistically improbable," Bones countered.

"Scientifically improbable," Booth corrected, "but, in the real world, impossible."

"Do you recognise these two girls?" Bones asked, ignoring Booth's contribution as she placed photographs of their two suspects on the table as well.

"Man, every girl that comes in there talks to me," Gregg said with a brief smirk. "I don't remember them."

"Why does every girl talk to you?" Bones asked.

"'Cause I'm cute and scary," Gregg replied.

"Yeah, you do pretty well with the teenage girls, don't you, Gregory?" Booth said. "You get them all tingly?"

"All right, that sex offender thing?" Gregg said, turning to glare at Booth. "It's a joke, man. Look it up; I got drunk, and I took a leak in a public fountain."

"Yeah, we did look it up," Bones pointed out. "There was a group of school girls on the other side of that fountain."

"Four times, you've been caught with your pants down, all around teenage girls," Booth said. "Coincidence?"

It might be somewhat hypocritical of him to bring that up after his relationship with Buffy when she was in high school, but Buffy had already been very psychologically mature for her age after everything she'd been through as the Slayer; it wasn't the same thing.

"Two years ago," he continued, indicating the photograph of Judith Evans, "you told this girl's sister that she took off with some guy."

"Do you remember her?" Bones asked.

"Yeah, sure," Gregg said in resignation. "It's the girl that disappeared."

"The thing about you guys, you're all the same," Booth said, remembering all too well some occasions in the past where Angelus had identified who'd be most likely to help him approach his latest target. "You sniff each other out. Who was the guy?"

"Judith Evans disappeared October 24th, two years ago," Bones said, after Gregg simply sat in silence without responding to Booth's question. "Stella Higgins, one year ago, a week before Halloween."

"So?" Gregg asked.

"So," Bones continued, adding a third photo of the latest missing girl, "Megan Shaw vanished from the same place."

"You can see the common element here, can't you, Gregg?" Booth said. "You."

"Coincidence," Gregg repeated.

"There are no coincidences in a murder investigation," Bones said.

"Well, it's got nothing to do with me," Gregg said.

Booth had finally lost patience with this kid's attitude; it might prompt complaints of police brutality later, but right now he wanted answers, and he wasn't going to accept this punk's attempts to stonewall him any more. Slapping Gregg on the side of the head, Booth ignored his protests as he repeated the gesture before grabbing his shoulders and forcing him to look at the photographs.

"Hey!" he said, making sure the kid was looking at the picture as he spoke. "Megan Shaw was _fourteen years old_ , understand me? Who was the guy?"

Reinforcing his threat, Bones delivered her own slap on the suspect, Booth's compliment of her contribution apparently the only catalyst Gregg needed to snap the last of his resolve.

"There was no guy!" he said indignantly. "It was Lola!"

"Lola?" Booth repeated, releasing his grip as he quickly went over everyone he'd met in this case so far. "The girl with the piercings?"

"Yeah," Gregg said.

"What the hell were you doing with her?" Booth asked, releasing his grip.

"It's not what you think," Gregg said, shrugging off his discomfort. "The girls come with me, maybe we get it on a little… Lola likes that."

"Your girlfriend likes to see you with other girls?" Bones asked sceptically.

"She likes to interrupt," Gregg corrected."You know, maybe smack them around a little."

"Smack around?" Booth repeated.

"Yeah," Gregg said. "It gets Lola hot, for us, for later. Sometimes, maybe she goes a little too far."

Once again, Booth found himself lost as to how to respond to such a statement; sometimes, people freaked him out more than demons ever could…

* * *

  
Dressed in his Halloween costume for the night, Booth had to admit that he was kind of looking forward to this; after decades of avoiding Halloween while watching it from the outside, it was kind of nice to be involved in a Halloween party where he _knew_ there wasn't going to be a supernatural element.

He'd decided against his brief thought of going as a vampire to this particular outing- it would have felt slightly amusing, but it would have also just been strange when he really thought about it; after spending so long working towards being human, he wasn't about to _pretend_ to be a vampire- but had eventually decided to have some fun by dressing up as an exaggerated member of the Jeffersonian staff, wearing a blue labcoat, thick-rimmed glasses, exaggeratedly short trousers, and strapping a large calculator to his belt.

"I got a profile of the killer from Sweets," he said, standing outside the door of the room where Bones was apparently changing into her costume.

"You mean Doctor Sweets," his partner corrected from the other side of the door.

"Well, it's only theory, Bones; I mean, it's what he's best at, even if he is only twelve," Booth said as he studied the profile. "Sweets says the killer is definitely a male…"

"Gregg's a male," Bones noted.

"No, Gregg and Lola work their sick little thing together," Booth corrected, before he continued reading the file. "Sweets says that the killer works alone and has a respectable blue-collar job… In his public life, he's into saving people, he's unmarried… Oh, he has a police or military background."

"You do realize that Sweets is describing you, right?" Bones asked as she walked out of the lab, dressed in a red-and-blue bathing suit with red boots and silver bracelets, leaving Booth initially stunned into silence. "How do I look?"

"Good," Booth said, smiling in approval. "Wonder-ful. Get it?"

"Yeah," Bones said.

"'Cause you're Wonder Woman," Booth elaborated; he'd never thought about the gaps in his cultural knowledge as Angel, but he rather enjoyed using the analogies as Seeley Booth.

"I know," Bones said. "What are you supposed to be?"

"Oh, I'm a nerd squint," Booth answered, pushing his glasses up and pulling out his calculator as he put on an exaggerated nasally voice. "You see, what is the rationale behind that conclusion?"

"That's not what they look or sound like," Bones said, as the two of them headed back towards the platform.

"You mean 'we'," Booth corrected, still in his voice. "That's not what 'we' look or sound like."

"OK," Bones said.

"You see what I did right there?" Booth said, laughing slightly at the thought. "I corrected you, you know, in character, as a squint!"

Despite how amusing he'd found it at the time, Booth was actually grateful when Zack appeared; he wasn't entirely sure how much further he could take that particular 'joke' before his partner or one of the team took offense.

* * *

  
As he walked back into the Jeffersonian lab later that night, still dressed in his 'squint' costume but feeling decidedly less cheery than he had when he'd put it on, Booth knew that this was definitely one case where he had missed being a vampire.

Getting injured as a human always sucked, of course- after two and a half centuries of enduring all kinds of punishment and healing from all but the worst damage within a couple of days, it sometimes frustrated him when he had to take time off for weeks to recuperate- but this was one case where he missed his vampiric status for more practical reasons; if he'd still been Angel, he could have let that guy shoot him, play dead to lure him into dropping his guard, and then arrest the bastard when he got in too close…

"Where is everybody?" Bones asked, breaking him out of his morbid train of thought as she looked around the empty lab.

"At the party, I guess," Booth said.

"We could still go," Bones suggested.

"We look like hell," Booth pointed out.

"It's a Halloween party," Bones said, looking over at him in surprise. "We could be Wonder Woman and… what's Superman's secret identity?"

"Clark Kent," Booth replied, placing his 'nerd glasses' back on his face, smiling at the suggestion.

"Yes," Bones said, as she sat down on the steps leading up to the lab. "We could be Wonder Woman and Clark Kent after a really, _really_ bad date."

"Yeah," Booth said, indicating his still-sore side. "Bad date because you shot me."

"It was only a flesh wound," Bones countered. "And you dropped me on my head."

"After you shot me," Booth countered, removing his glasses as he sat down beside his partner. "OK, I think I got you on this one… OK, Wonder Woman?"

"I'm sorry you had to kill someone," Bones said after a moment of silence, looking sympathetically at him. "I know you hate that."

"Yeah… he had it coming," Booth said; he didn't like taking lives, but he wasn't going to complain about killing someone who'd assaulted, killed and mummified at least two teenage girls…

"You hate it," Bones said, in that simple tone of understanding that she'd developed over the course of their partnership. "I'm sorry that happened to you."

"We saved the girl," Booth pointed out, deciding to focus on something else. "That's a pretty good date."

"Except not really a date," Bones corrected.

"I know," Booth acknowledged. "It was…"

"Work," Bones corrected. "Not a date."

"Really, really hard one," Booth said.

"And we're not really Wonder Woman and Clark Kent," Bones continued. "We're Brennan and Booth."

"Look, you're the one who brought up the date analogy," Booth said, suddenly struck by the need to end this increasingly bizarre conversation before it got into particularly uncomfortable territory…

"You hungry?" Bones said, after a brief period of silence.

"Yeah," Booth said, putting his costume's glasses back on.

"Me too," Bones said, as they both stood up and headed for the lab doors.

It was slightly weird to glance behind himself and see Bones spinning in a circle in the middle of the room, but Booth had to admit that he actually liked it; in a weird way, it reinforced how she was still fundamentally human, despite her over-the-top scientific knowledge at times…


	50. Intern in the Incinerator

When he first heard that a body had been discovered inside the Jeffersonian itself, Booth was suddenly grateful that he was no longer in contact with Xander and disturbed at how much time he must have spent with the kid; he immediately started imagining Xander making jokes about how the killer was trying to save them time by bringing the corpse to them directly.

"At four hundred degrees, bone chars in six hours and turns to ash in eight," Bones was saying as he approached the cellar with the incinerator in it.

"Charring, no ash," Cam said as he entered the room, briefly glancing at her watch while keeping her torch focused on the corpse. "Six to eight hours? Dumped into the incinerator between one and three a.m."

"Ugh," he said, drawing their attention to his presence as he studied the body before them; he was vaguely reminded of some of the old threats he'd heard banded around the office back when he was in control of Wolfram & Hart. "Alive or dead before he or she went into the incinerator?"

"Can't tell yet," Cam said.

"What's that?" Bones asked, indicating the file in his hand.

"Guest log," Booth answered, glancing through the file as Bones walked over to study it with him. "No visitors checked out after nine thirty-six last night, and no one checked in before eight o' two this morning."

"Meaning the victim probably works here," Cam said.

"Meaning the killer does too," Bones added.

Booth was suddenly grateful that his partner wasn't more social; it was highly unlikely that any killer from their team would be this careless about disposing of evidence, so at least it meant that she was unlikely to discover that someone she _knew_ was a killer…

* * *

  
"Why do you want me to interrogate Aldrige?" Bones asked as they left the elevator heading for the interrogation room.

"Because he thinks I'm stupid," Booth said; it was a basic explanation, but it was at least the correct one, given the man's obvious pride in his own IQ.

"You're not!" Bones protested.

"Thanks, Bones, I know," Booth said, grateful for his partner's automatic defence before he continued giving her his instructions. "Listen, during the interrogation, always refer to the victim by her first name."

"Well, you're the one that told me that personalizing the victim doesn't work with sociopathic serial killers," Bones said, poking him firmly in the chest. "They lack all empathy; _you_ told me that!"

"We are not looking for gorgonzola today!" Booth protested.

"Gormogon," Bones corrected sharply (He wondered if this was part of the reason Buffy got demon names wrong; it _was_ kind of funny). "Gor-mo-gon."

"We're looking for someone who murdered one girl and tossed her down an incinerator chute," Booth said, ignoring his partner's correction as he shooed her into the interrogation room. "Entirely different kind of guy, so, inside."

"Don't tell me- don't- you are not bossing me- stop it!" Bones protested, smacking his hand away before she turned to walk into the room, leaving Booth to head for the observation area where Doctor Reardon was watching Kyle Aldrige sitting behind the desk as the anthropologist walked in and sat down.

"Kyle Aldrige seduced my daughter?" Doctor Reardon asked.

"That's what we hope to find out, doc," Booth said, focusing on the scene before him as Bones began her interrogation.

" _It was definitely Kristen's blood on your work table_ ," Bones said.

" _That proves only she was killed in my work room_ ," Aldrige said. " _Why am I talking to you_?"

" _What time did you leave the Jeffersonian that night_?" Bones asked, ignoring his counter-question.

" _Shortly after eleven_ ," Aldrige said, before leaning forward as he stared at her. " _Doctor Brennan,_ _surely I merit someone higher up the food chain than an FBI consultant_?"

" _Kyle_ ," Bones countered, leaning over the table to better confront him with her own smug smile, " _I know you get everything you want by flaunting your superior intellect, but that won't work with me_."

" _Why is that_?" Aldrige replied.

" _Because I'm smarter than you are_ ," Bones responded, leaning back and folding her arms, a dismissive, casual manner that reinforced how unthreatening she found her 'opponent' (He was suddenly reminded of seeing Buffy fight using techniques he'd taught her). " _So why don't we do the rational thing and cut to the chase_ _; were you having an affair with Kristen_?"

" _I'm not willing to comment on that_ ," Aldrige said.

" _Again, I know you were_ ," Bones said. " _You first kissed at the opening of the Egyptian exhibit_."

" _Obviously Kristen was indiscreet_ ," Aldrige said, Doctor Reardon tearing up beside Booth as he heard his daughter dismissed so casually.

" _If your wife knew about Kristen, she'd leave you, correct_?" Bones continued, leaning forward once again (He wasn't sure if she was ready to handle a solo interview with their average suspect, but in a case like this she really knew how to get under the other guy's skin). " _And you'd no longer be rich. See, the FBI, they call that a motive. They think you did this, Doctor Aldrige, and so far the evidence is on their side. Can you tell me anything that would suggest otherwise_?"

" _Yes_ ," Aldrige replied. " _But first I need to speak with a lawyer and make arrangements with a federal prosecutor_."

" _Sounds like you want to cut a deal_ ," Bones said.

" _I've told you what I need, so either have me arrested or let me make those arrangements_ ," Aldrige said firmly.

As Bones glanced over at the window, evidently trying to look at him, Booth turned his gaze to Doctor Reardon, but knew that he'd have to follow this one up later; the man was in no state right now to say what he wanted to happen regarding his daughter's killer.

* * *

  
Stuck for anything else to do with his time after the personally chaotic events of the previous night's fake date and the frustration of their current limited progress in the case, Booth simply stood in the lab overlooking Hodgins' desk, playing with glass stir sticks to try and kill time as he waited for the scientist to show up.

Hodgins might be weird, but he was also the closest male friend Booth had in this lab right now (He just wasn't that comfortable at the idea of talking to Zack about this); if he was going to talk to anyone, the entomologist was the best call…

"Why are you here?" Hodgins asked, walking up to Booth holding a tray that seemed to be carrying the rope Aldrige had used to hang himself.

"I'm just waiting for Cam to finish cutting up Aldrige," Booth said.

"She's done," Hodgins said. "Why are you here in my area?"

"Cam's sister kissed me," Booth said; it might be awkward, but at least getting it said now would save him having to discuss it with anyone else, and Hodgins could offer _some_ kind of useful perspective…

"Duuuuuuuuuuuude," Hodgins said, sitting down at his desk.

"Don't call me dude," Booth said, quickly regretting his decision; for a brilliant scientist, Hodgins could be shockingly immature at times. "Alright, listen, I was supposed to be Cam's boyfriend, but only between the hours of six-thirty and ten. She kissed me at six-twenty so technically that doesn't even count."

The more Hodgins chuckled, the more Booth was starting to regret his decision, but he nevertheless committed himself to explaining the full situation; regardless of his doubts, he had made his decision now and he had to go along with it. "Cam went to her office to get something. Felicia, she just grabbed me and planted one on me. I didn't even see it coming, I didn't even have a defence maneuver planned."

"Wow," Hodgins said, glancing around to make sure that they were alone. "Alright, alright, uh . . . How are you… how are you gonna break it to Cam?"

"What?" Booth asked. "Why would I do that?"

"You want her to find out from her sister?" Hodgins asked, bringing up a frustrating point that he'd never considered earlier; this kind of thing had _never_ been an issue when he was Angel (Mainly because Dawn had never been old enough to be a problem and Cordelia didn't have siblings; anything he did as Angelus naturally didn't count).

"Wow, this is worse than when we were a couple," Booth said, prompting an amused chuckle from Hodgins that wouldn't quieten down despite Booth's attempt at a threat.

It wasn't like he missed the days when he could intimidate even his allies because they knew about what he'd done as Angelus; he just wished that people would stop taking _pleasure_ in those moments when he made a mistake.

He appreciated that the Powers That Be had given Seeley Booth an awkward past to give him a good reason _not_ to want to talk about it, but it could get easily awkward when this kind of thing happened…

* * *

  
Studying the array of weapons spread out before him, Booth wondered at the sense of nostalgia he felt as he took in the arsenal in question; he might have used more elaborate weapons when he was Angel, but swords and the like could still take him back to those old days…

"I checked every bronze weapon in the Jeffersonian that matches Angela's criteria," Hodgins said, as Booth examined a spear from the veritable arsenal laid out before them. "None are consistent with the fragments removed from Kristen."

"Well," Booth said, as he passed the spear back to the entomologist, "obviously we're looking for a weapon that was smuggled in."

The sceptical sounds from the two scientists cut off that train of thought. "What were those noises?"

"There is no way to smuggle an eight-hundred year old bronze weapon into the Jeffersonian," Bones said firmly.

"No, no," Hodgins confirmed. "We have x-rays, guards, metal detectors…"

"You come in with anything bigger than a watch, they search you," Bones continued.

"You two are geniuses, how would you do it?" Booth asked, looking at the two scientists in a challenging manner.

"It's absolutely impossible," Hodgins said.

"Unless you mail it," Bones pointed out.

"Oh," Hodgins said. "Yeah, right, there's there."

"What?" Booth said, unable to believe such an obvious gap in the institution's security.

"If you mail something to the Jeffersonian, it doesn't need to be cleared by customs or security," Bones explained.

"OK," Booth said, unable to believe what he was hearing, "you're saying that if I want to get a stolen artifact into the United States, all I have to do is mail it to the Jeffersonian?"

"Technically, yes," Bones elaborated, "but the fact is we check and report all items to the government."

"OK, who's 'we'?" Booth asked.

"The authentications department…" Hodgins said, closing his eyes and dropping his head in realisation.

"Oh, OK, you mean a bunch of starving interns who work here during the summer?" Booth pointed out (Seriously, with that kind of security system he was amazed that _more_ people weren't smuggling things in).

"Interns keep detailed records of every item they authenticate," Bones said, looking over at Hodgins. "Access Kristen Reardon's log."

"I suppose Gormogon could've mailed himself to the Jeffersonian, stolen an I.D. and simply walked out," Hodgins reflected as he and Bones moved over to the nearest computer.

"This has got nothing to do with Goobagon -" Booth began.

"Gormogon!" Bones corrected.

"Whatever," Booth said. "How many times do I have to say that?"

"I don't have the necessary clearance," Hodgins said, as his attempt to pull up the records met with failure.

"Let me try," Bones said, the anthropologist sitting down at the computer, only to be met with an 'ACCESS DENIED' message. "Neither do I!"

"Excuse me," Booth said, moving the two scientists aside to sit down himself; he might not be Willow or Fred when it came to modern technology, but he'd picked up some tricks over the years…

"Wait, you have a password?" Bones asked.

"Yeah, Cam's," Booth said, shrugging as the anthropologist stared at him. "What; she won't mind."

Hodgins smiled as Bones looked incredulously at him, but she soon had other things to focus on as Hodgins turned his attention to the screen before them.

"Well," he said, studying the records being brought up on the screen before them, "Kristen Reardon worked on a lot of sixteenth century Baroque wood carvings."

"I know your password too," Booth said, smiling over at his partner as Hodgins continued his search. "It's daffodil."

"I never told you that!" Bones protested.

"What?" Booth said. "I've got eyes. I mean, you guys aren't exactly CIA material."

"Daffodil?" Hodgins repeated quietly.

"What?" Bones protested. "They're pretty."

"It looks like Kristen might've worked on some Luristan bronzes," Hodgins said, turning his attention back to the computer as an array of images appeared on the screen.

"Any from the thirteenth century?" Bones asked, as Hodgins pulled up a list and pictures of the relevant artefacts.

"Yeah," the entomologist said. "Tools, utensils, sculptures…"

"What's Luristan?" Booth asked.

"Persia," Bones answered.

"You mean Iran or Iraq," Booth commented, enjoying the chance to be the source of comparatively obscure information for once as both scientists turned to him. "Since the war Iraqi museums have been looted and their pieces are being sold on the black market. This murder has nothing to do with the vault. Or a serial killer."

"Kristen Reardon was a smuggler?" Hodgins asked.

"More than likely _killed_ by a smuggler," Booth corrected; he wasn't going to start slandering a potentially innocent girl when they had no reason to suspect her one way or the other.

"She goes to report something and the smuggler kills her," Hodgins speculated, prompting a confirming nod from Booth at his assessment.

"I'll have Zack check all these as possible murder weapons," Bones said, before turning to look at Booth as she moved to the computer. "And I'm changing my password."

It was a minor detail, but Booth rather enjoyed the moment when he was able to accurately guess his partner's new password just moments after she'd changed it; he'd spent so long isolated from people that it made a nice change to be making accurate assessments of how people ticked outside of criminals and killers.

* * *

  
With the case resolved and things with Cam and her sister patched up- he still didn't know how he should feel about the fact that he'd been dismissed as an issue so quickly; it wasn't like he wasn't to be trouble, but he still felt awkward when he was treated like an unneeded extra- Booth was left to sit contemplatively in his office at the Hoover building, pouring shots of wine into small paper cups as he smiled at his partner.

"Don't take it so hard," he said, looking reassuringly at her; compared to some of the betrayals he'd endured over the years, Bones learning that someone at the Jeffersonian had killed someone didn't really rate, when he got down to it.

"I'm not taking anything hard," Bones said, as Booth raised his cup to hers. "What are we, Russian?"

"Nostrovia; yeah," Booth said, taking the shots and crushing the cups. "I'll tell you what else I know. What you're taking hard is the fact that it happened in your house."

"It's not my house!" Bones protested.

"Not where you sleep!" Booth corrected, once again amused at his partner's social gaps as he picked up the bottle. "Your favourite place, the house of reason, the Jeffersonian…"

"No, it's not my favourite place," Bones continued to protest.

"Yes, it is," Booth said firmly

"What, no it's not… how do you know?" Bones began, clearly recognising that denial wasn't going to get her anywhere right now.

"Daffodil. Daisy. Jupiter," Booth said, pouring a new pair of shots as he smiled at her. "OK, I'll tell you what else I know; you were hoping that it was gorgonzola."

"Gormogon!" Bones corrected after they had taken the shots.

"Ah!" Booth said. "So you admit it!"

"Accidentally!" Bones protested, before she looked slightly sadly at him. "Does- does that count?"

"Yes," Booth said. "Look, all the scientists and the squints and the eggheads, they wanted it to be a serial killer so it wouldn't be one of them."

"Them?" Bones asked.

"You," Booth clarified.

"Me?" Bones said.

"One of you," Booth elaborated. "You were all offended that it was one of you."

"You know what?" Bones said. "I am offended."

"I just said that," Booth said, pouring another shot.

"I'm offended!" Bones began, only to trail off as she tried to find the best way to say it. "Because…"

"Because you were betrayed by one of your own," Booth said.

"Yes," Bones said, looking uncertainly at him. "Are you going to betray me?"

"No," Booth said firmly.

Bones might make jokes about the situation, but Booth would never betray her on purpose; he'd seen how much damage betrayals could cause, both when he was Angelus and when he was Angel (Even if he liked to think that his betrayals as Angel had been done for better reasons most of the time), and he would never inflict such damage on Bones if he could help it.

For the moment, the most important thing was that they work out where Gormogon was; they'd take everything else as it came to them and plan accordingly.


	51. The Boy in the Time Capsule

"Wow, now this is a sweet field," Booth said, taking in the field around him; he might not have attended an actual high school, but his time observing Buffy's friends in Sunnydale and his fake memories as Booth had given him a degree of insight into what made a good school

"This is what I'm talking about, right. I mean, it's nothing like ours but hey, that didn't stop me from being MVP my Senior year. Got the trophy. Touchdown!"

"In certain tribes in the African subcontinent, piercings serve as a reminder- like your trophy- of the power and agility which has since faded away," Bones noted.

"What do you mean, fade away…" Booth began, before he focused on the facts of the situation; talking about his fake past wasn't going to help him make a point to his partner right now. "Woah! Time out; can we just concentrate on the case? What do we got here?"

"We were all gathered for the opening," the officer in charge of the time capsule said, responding to Booth's question. "We had, uh, no idea that that thing was in there."

"Whoa," Booth whistled, studying the contents of the capsule, which resembled some kind of swamp more than anything else. "Now that is rank."

"I was just expecting to see my 10,000 Maniacs album," the officer said.

"That was not there," another man said, wearing a blue shirt as he indicated the capsule's contents.

"Who are you?" Booth asked.

"I'm Gil Bates," the man said. "I-I sealed it myself. I used a propylene seal and industrial bolt lags."

"Adolescent Caucasian male," Bones said, studying the skull while ignoring the lingering stench. "Late teens, early twenties."

"Alright," Booth said, noting that down on his pad. "So… what do you say we just pack it all up and ship it back to the Jeffersonian?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, that's not a good idea," Gil cut in. "You see, the water has compromised the structural integrity of the case so-"

"Would you look at this, Bones?" Booth said, smiling at the other man. "Another nerd for your squint squad."

"Drill," Bones said.

"Drill," Booth repeated, before realising what he was saying. "Drill? Whoa, wait a second. You're gonna drill right here? What about taking it all back to the Jeffersonian?"

"Tub," Bones said in response, placing a bucket underneath the capsule as she made a hole to drain the liquid out.

As methods of getting the capsule safe to transport went, Booth had to admit that it had its merits; drain out the water and leave the hard material for them to study.

* * *

  
"Roger's father had no trouble getting physical so why would he resort to poisoning his son with a nerve agent?" Bones asked as they drove away from the latest interview, reflecting on their discoveries of the current case.

"What sort of teenager were you, Bones?" Booth asked; he might have to lie about his own past, even with Booth's fake memories, but he'd spent enough time watching Sunnydale High students when he was dating Buffy to have _some_ idea what Bones's generation would have been like in general.

"He did have a series of odd jobs," Bones continued, once again in one of her moods where he wasn't sure if she was focusing on the case to ignore him or ignoring him because she was focused on the case. "Perhaps he procured the poison from one of them."

"Come on," Booth said, wanting to learn the answer to his latest question. "You have to at least have _one_ good story before you pasted on the lab coat."

"I was busy," Bones said simply. "Studying."

"And in all those hours of studying, you never came across one hormone?" Booth asked, unable to believe that; Willow had been the most studious high school student he'd ever met during his time in Sunnydale and she'd dated Oz as well as crushing on Xander, to say nothing of a couple of stories Fred had mentioned of her own high school experiences…

"Fine," Bones admitted in resignation, smiling slightly at the memory. "There was one boy… Andy Fluger. He was the Varsity Lacrosse captain."

"Did you kiss the Varsity Lacrosse captain?" Booth asked (It was one of the odder crushes he'd encountered, but considering that Oz had first fallen for Willow after seeing her dressed as an Eskimo, he'd certainly heard stranger).

"I was weighing the pros and cons when he became my secret Santa," Bones responded, slightly sheepishly.

"I thought you hated secret Santa?" Booth asked.

"Yes!" Bones said firmly. "Because he taped the gift to my locker. Everyone saw it. Teenagers can be cruel."

"What was it?" Booth asked.

"Doesn't matter," his partner said.

"Come on, Bones," Booth said promptingly; she couldn't bring up something like that and _not_ expect him to follow it up…

"You promise not to laugh?" Bones asked.

"I promise!" Booth said. "I'm your partner."

"It was a Brainy Smurf," Bones said, prompting an involuntary snort from Booth before he could stop himself. "You said you wouldn't laugh!"

"I'm not laughing," Booth said, trying to hold back his amusement; the idea of Bones wanting a model Smurf was just strange… "Brainy Smurf, huh?"

"What?" Bones said, as Booth fought to restrain his laughter "It was deliberate; he knew I wanted Smurfette!... OK, it's clear you find this amusing."

"I'm not laughing," Booth said, trying to fight the laughs down. "I'm not. What?"

"You know, Angela was right," Bones said firmly, as she turned back to look at the road ahead of them. "You were one of 'those guys'."

Even as he automatically tried to protest against it, Booth hated the reminder of what he'd been like the first time he'd been human, so many centuries ago, when the only thing on Liam's mind was getting laid and disappointing his father…

He might not have been one of 'those guys' in the context that Bones and Angela were implying, but he had been the contemporary equivalent.

* * *

  
"Come on, Sweets!" Booth said, looking urgently at the psychiatrist, trying to postpone the potentially inevitable discussion about topics that he really didn't want to bring up. "Just… come on! You've done a lot of psychological profiling! The case is twenty years old. We just need some help."

"That's not why we're here today, Agent Booth," Sweets said (Seriously, this kid was more of a machine than those robots that tried to use Wesley's dad against him; at least they tried something _interesting_ when mounting their attack). "This hour is for you and Doctor Brennan."

"Oh, she's not gonna mind, it's only going to take five minutes, OK?" Booth said, holding the file in front of Sweets. "1987; suburban kid is killed and stuffed into a time capsule. Fascinating, right? What kind of person would do that?"

"So have any conflicts or issues arisen since our last session?" Sweets asked, ignoring Booth's attempts to get his insight as he looked at the anthropologist (Seriously, Booth had never felt like they had _any_ issues until this guy started talking to them; why couldn't he just offer some insight into a killer rather than work on fixing something that didn't feel broken?)

"Well-" Bones began.

"Bones and I are doing just great!" Booth interjected, as he sat back down on the couch.

"You look angry, Doctor Brennan," Sweets said.

"I told Agent Booth a private story about my childhood and he laughed," Bones said in exasperation.

"What?" Booth said, partially whispering to his partner in indignation. "No, I-I was appreciating it; don't get him involved."

"Snorting does not suggest appreciation," Bones said grimly.

"It was about a cartoon character from the 1980s!" Booth protested. "I didn't think you'd be so sensitive!"

"Well, childhood icons have great significance to us, Agent Booth," Sweets said. "I myself was very attached to Voltron… Cartoon."

"Voltron?" Booth asked (He'd been living on the streets during that time frame when he was Angel and Booth had been a little old for cartoons at that point in his life, so the name meant nothing to him).

"You're hurt, Dr. Brennan, because you feel you opened yourself up to Agent Booth and he betrayed that trust," Sweets said, ignoring Booth's stare.

"You're talking about a Smurf…" Booth protested.

"Smurfette," Bones countered defensively.

"Perhaps a way to bring this relationship back into symmetry is if you reveal a childhood story about yourself," Sweets said, looking thoughtfully at him. "Show your vulnerability to Doctor Brennan."

"No," Booth said, instantly against that idea; he'd avoided talking about his past for years due to his issues about the ethics of Seeley Booth's false background, and he certainly couldn't tell Bones anything from his _real_ past. "You know what? This is crazy. It's- it's not right. Tell him that it's not right."

"Is it?" Bones asked.

"Oh, you're on _his_ side!" Booth said defensively. "Why don't you go play Voltron with him?"

"You were 'that guy' weren't you, Agent Booth?" Sweets said probingly. "You were the golden boy who could get away with anything just by turning on the charm?"

"That's ridiculous," Booth protested (Liam might have gone chasing barmaids, but it was mainly his father's reputation that had saved him from the worst of the trouble he might have gotten himself into). "You don't even know who I am."

"Could it be that you're still holding on to that persona?" Sweets said thoughtfully. "That you're afraid to reveal yourself?"

"I'm an FBI agent," Booth said; he'd faced all kinds of monsters back when he was a vampire, and just because he was less capable now than he was in those days didn't mean that he was scared (Keeping the truth about his background secret was _not_ fear; it was .

"I get shot at every day; I'm not afraid of anything."

"OK, this is obviously very difficult for you but you shouldn't be ashamed to ask for help," Sweets said (Booth suddenly wondered just how much Sweets knew about their current case; that last statement was _far_ too reminiscent of Gil's earlier question…).

"You shouldn't," Bones said, looking patiently at him.

"OK," Booth said, sitting back down. "OK, I apologize. I do. I need help… with this case. So, while you review this, I will reveal myself to Bones."

As he sat down beside Bones, he placed his hand on his partner's knee, only realizing after he'd said and done those things how it might appear to an outsider. "I know that sounded weird, but you know what I mean."

"So you will share an emotionally humiliating episode from your youth with me?" Bones asked.

"Yeah, I-I have 'em," Booth said, before passing the file to Sweets; he'd work out how to deal with that topic once they had this case sorted and resolved. "Here."

For a moment, Booth hoped that Sweets would consider that the end of the matter, but then Sweets handed out various hats to begin the 'role-play' part of their session and Booth knew that he wasn't going to be that lucky.

God, he'd endured _Hell_ and managed to come out with his sanity relatively intact after getting over his initial feral mentality (He still didn't really remember much before he'd 'woken up' with Buffy in that janitor's closet, but the point still stood); why did he have to endure this stupid mess because some people _thought_ he should have issues with his partner?

* * *

  
"Pretty sure that Sweets would say a lost baseball game is not personal or revealing," Bones said, as the two of them fetched coffee in the FBI building.

"Football, Bones, OK; it's football," Booth said, before he decided to try something else; it hadn't exactly happened in _Booth's_ past, but it was a genuine experience from Liam's life that it would be easy enough to 'edit' to fit the modern world. "Oh, OK, I got one. Alright, personally, between two people or revealing like, uh...aha! Naked?"

"That's very literal," Bones said.

"There was this girl, Karen Eisley, and we were under the bleachers one night- personally," Booth said (It had been a barn on the outskirts of town, but that didn't matter for his current purpose). "With me?"

"Got it," Bones said. "You were having sex, in the dirt, under the bleachers."

"Excuse me, I'm a gentleman," Booth protested. "I brought my sleeping bag." (It had actually been a rug from the barn, but the point still stood).

"Did you fail to perform sexually?" Bones asked.

"What?" Booth said, shocked at the implication.

"'Cause that might actually count as a humiliation," Bones said as she walked past him.

"Will you just wait-" Booth protested as he hurried after the anthropologist. "Will you just- allow me to tell my story?"

"Fine," Bones said.

"Thank you," Booth said. "Alright, so this girl had this game where she would ask me a question-"

"What kind of question?" Bones asked.

"It doesn't matter," Booth said firmly. "OK, so if I got the question wrong I'd have to take off a piece of my clothing. Of course, I knew all the answers but I pretended that I didn't."

"So you could take off your clothes," Bones noted.

"Exactly- no," Booth said; getting into that wasn't going to help the case he was trying to make. "The point is I'm standing there, ya know, in my socks and my St. Christopher medal, and she runs off. She runs off with the sleeping bag and all my clothes and I'm standing there, starko."

"Well, why did she do that?" Bones asked.

"Well…" Booth said, recalling how this story had unfolded after he'd managed to get home, suddenly realising the potential flaw in his choice of story. "I suppose she heard I was under the bleachers with another girl the week before…"

"OK, this is a story about sexual browses, Booth," Bones said, trying to get past him. "You're bragging."

"I had to run across the campus buck naked," Booth said, unable to stop himself chuckling at the memory…

"You're laughing about it now," Bones said, walking around him and glaring at him. "You enjoyed displaying your penis. It showed alpha male mastery. Only one other person knew about Brainy Smurf. It was my mother."

Despite his best efforts to protest about the wider consequences of the incident, Booth had to recognise that she had a point; it was embarrassing to remember, but Liam had rather enjoyed being able to humiliate his father even further in that manner…

* * *

  
"Alright," Booth said, as he sat opposite his partner in the diner after the conclusion of their case, still trying to find an effective story from his past that wouldn't rely too heavily on the necessary lies, "there was this kid, uh, junior year…"

"OK, is this going to be another story where you think you were humiliated, but you actually were not?" Bones asked.

"Just listen to me," Booth continued; this story was a slight stretch, as it was partly based on something Wesley had mentioned from his own school experience before attending the Watcher's Academy full-time (Watchers were expected to have a legitimate academic history as well as their more exclusive background), but whoever created Booth's memories had given him a similar experience to draw on as well. "This kid, junior year; Harlan Kinney. He was one of those real weird, ya know, looking kids. He had this big Adam's apple sticking out and he wore his dad's clothes to school. Ya know, with the whole stretchy belt around his waist."

"What's wrong with that?" Bones asked. "It's practical."

"You're not listening," Booth said (Seriously, how could someone who'd actually lived among people be more socially ignorant than he was?). "He was one of those real superior types, always talking out of a thesaurus, and one day he came up to me and a bunch of my buddies and he called us a bunch of Philistines. You know what that means, right?"

"Yeah," Bones said. "A Philistine is a smug, ignorant person who is antagonistic toward higher thought and intelligence."

"Yeah, well, I didn't know what that meant till I looked it up," Booth explained. "I told Kinney, 'Look, I'm not Philistine. I'm Catholic'."

"That's pretty close to humiliation," Bones said, laughing at the thought.

"No, that's embarrassing," Booth corrected her. "That's not the humiliating part."

"Oh," Bones said.

"My buddy picked Kinney up and dangled him over the stairway," Booth explained. "You know, he begged and cried, and everyone laughed."

"How is this about you?" Bones asked.

"I laughed," Booth replied solemnly.

"I don't understand," Bones said.

"I could've stopped it," Booth said, the fake memory of this failed opportunity reminding him of his own failures to do good after regaining his soul before he saw Buffy; the scale was different but the point still stood. "I could've stepped in and helped the kid out. Instead I-I didn't. Chose my side, and it was the wrong side."

"So… you were humiliated because you didn't act like a hero?" Bones asked.

It was the way she phrased that, more than anything, that emphasised how pointless the story had been; nobody aside from him would have particularly cared if he did or didn't do anything…

"Fine," Booth said, giving up on the story; he wasn't going to get anywhere with stories from Seeley's past or anything he came up with based on his friends' stories, and obviously telling stories about Angel's life was never going to work in this instance. "Fine. You know what? I'm perfect. My life was perfect."

"It's a good story, OK?" Bones said. "But it's a bad one. I… it's both, I guess. I mean, I get it."

"Yeah?" Booth asked.

"What is that?" Bones asked, noticing that Booth was holding something in his hand.

"Nothing," Booth said, folding his arms to hide it even as he knew she'd already seen it; Bones was too good at noticing minor details in bone to have missed something this comparatively vivid.

"Well, you evolved," Bones said. "And evolution is very impressive, and that is definitely not nothing."

That simple statement meant more to Booth than he could have ever expressed; his partner couldn't know just how much he'd changed since those days, and she _still_ approved of how he'd changed…

"This?" Booth asked, giving into impulse as he held up the Brainy Smurf model he'd picked up earlier.

"Did you bring that for me?" Bones asked, glaring at him.

"No," Booth said briefly.

"Good, because it's the wrong Smurf," Bones said. "I liked Smurfette. That's Brainy Smurf."

"Well, Smurfette was a stupid, shallow Smurf who only had her looks," Booth said (The Smurf series had been released when he was having one of his better periods in terms of human interaction, so he was at least aware of what the series was about). "Look, you're better than Smurfette. You have your looks and a whole lot more."

"You did bring that for me to charm me in case I didn't find your humiliation story impressive, but I did, so…" Bones said, her tone thoughtful as Booth held the model out before him.

"Aha!" Booth said, smiling at her minor confession. "So I did impress you!"

"That's what impressive means, dummy," Bones said. "You're such a Philistine."

"I'll tell you what," Booth said, smiling at her as he held out the Brainy Smurf figure. "You can hold on to this, and it will remind you how far I've come."

"I forgive you for snorting, Booth," Bones said, taking the Smurf figurine from him.

"Evolution is a long, long process," Booth said, reflecting on his own personal changes since he began his life as Liam to his current life as Booth. "It takes hundreds of years."

"Thousands," Bones corrected.

"Why do you have to always correct me?" Booth asked rhetorically.

"To help you evolve," Bones replied, the two exchanging smiles as Bones shook her head at him.

If it wasn't for the fact that she could never process the existence of vampires, Booth was tempted to find out how she'd react to the news of just how far he'd come over the course of his life…


	52. The Knight on the Grid

"Traffic?" Booth asked, looking curiously at Cam as she finally arrived at the crime scene as the teams were finishing cordoning it off.

"Doctor Brennan looked a little hurt when I told her you asked me to come out here instead of her," Cam said, getting out of the car and walking over to join him as he lifted the crime scene tape to let her in.

"No," Booth said, shaking his head at the idea as they began to walk. "Bones's feelings… they don't get hurt. She's not like you."

"Like me?" Cam repeated while pulling her gloves on.

"Yeah," Booth said. "A girl."

"Yeah," Cam said firmly. "The word you're looking for would be 'woman'… who, incidentally, makes more money than you."

"Touchy," Booth said.

"What can I say?" Cam said. "I'm just a girl with feelings."

"Alright, listen," Booth said, as they walked over to the plastic-covered corpse lying amid assorted bags of garbage. "The construction crew, they found a body this afternoon; the keyword is _body_ , as in still meaty."

"Male," Cam said, removing the plastic sheets that had been draped over it and examining the corpse with her torch. "Middle-aged."

"Bones…" Booth said, suddenly feeling the need to correct Cam's observation techniques. "She usually, uh, kneels next to the remains."

"These are designer pants and my bodies are always so much… gushier… than Doctor Brennan's," Cam pointed out.

"Just saying," Booth said (He refrained from asking why anyone would wear designer anything to a crime scene).

"Looks like a stab wound to the middle of the chest," Cam said, bending over to examine the remains after rolling her eyes at him. "Naked, wrapped in plastic, bite marks to the face and extremities… Looks like rats."

"Rats?" Booth said, suddenly flashing back to one of his less pleasant experiences as Angel; he'd generally been lucky, but even that one time he'd woken up to find himself getting eaten by rats while he was sleeping in alleys was one time too many, and it was _not_ something he liked to remember any more than he had to…

He was relieved when Cam found additional evidence in the body; it might make this case more complicated, but anything that meant he didn't have to think about his more self-destructive phase after the doughnut shop was fine with him.

* * *

  
"This mausoleum's been here since the eighteen hundreds," Hodgins explained, as he and Booth walked through the Silver Hills Cemetery, searching for the mausoleum that Angela had identified in her search. "It's paid for by a trust. As far as the director of the cemetery knows, no one's been out here for a century."

"This better be good," Booth said, wishing that he felt as confident as he was trying to appear; he might have spent some time in graveyards while in Sunnydale in particular, but it felt unnerving being back here without the old advantages of his vampiric strength, even if the odds of encountering any vampires in the nation's capitol were limited.

"Look," Hodgins said, shining his torch on the words written above the mausoleum doors. "'Pater Mortus'."

"Yeah," Booth said dismissively. "It means 'Dead Father'."

"You know Latin?" Hodgins said, looking at him in surprise. "Dude…"

"Altar boy," Booth clarified; at least that part of Booth's history could be true.

"You got a key?" Hodgins asked as they approached the mausoleum and began to study the doors .

"Yeah," Booth said, revealing the crowbar he'd brought for this purpose (Along with the stake in his back pocket just in case). "Got my own."

"Wait… wait… wait," Hodgins said, as Booth positioned the crowbar between the doors.

"What?" Booth asked, looking back at his colleague.

"Can I do it?" the entomologist asked eagerly.

"No, you don't let me play with your bugs," Booth countered, before setting to work with his crowbar. A couple of forceful shoves were all that was needed to open the doors, revealing a skeleton draped in the middle of the mausoleum, styled in exactly the same manner as the silver one they'd found in the bank vault, covered in spider's webs and dust.

"Ah, great, another one," Booth said; considering the positioning of the skeleton, the odds that it wasn't another Gormogon skeleton were virtually non-existent in his opinion.

"Booth," Hodgins noted, awe in his voice as he took in their discovery. "This one's completely made of bone."

Booth wondered if this was going to be a break in the case or just a twist that would make it even more disturbing than it had been; if the skeleton they had back at the Jeffersonian set a precedent, he had to wonder how many people had died to make _this_ one…

* * *

  
As each step in this case led to the next, this whole situation was just becoming more frustrating, and Booth was regretting the loss of his vampire prowess more than he ever had before; if he'd just had his old strength, he could have grabbed that kid out of Gormogon's hands and caught the bastard before he could run away. As it was, he'd had to prioritise and focus on saving the kid at that moment, leaving them with the recently-discovered Arthur Graves as their only remaining lead if they were going to find anything new.

Their attempt to set a trap for Gormogon had completely backfired even before Bones's over-acting was taken into account, and the only thing they'd learned from the ambush was that they were dealing with a seriously disturbing guy who was willing to tear out his own teeth to make some kind of warped symbolic statement (They'd discovered some details about how this guy chose his victims, but that could have been learned without the ambush). They'd managed to identify Graves based on their key to his old office, but that didn't mean they'd get anywhere by talking with the guy; they couldn't exactly make an old man talk about this kind of thing…

"Mr Graves has been here for five years," the nursing home attendant said, as he directed them to an old man sitting in a leather chair wearing a thick blue dressing-gown. "In a wheelchair for the last four. Sweet guy. A little particular about what he eats."

"You have no idea," Booth said, grimly reflecting on what they had uncovered about Graves' possible background.

"Beg your pardon?" the attendant asked.

"What's wrong with Mr Graves?" Bones asked, neatly distracting the attendant from Booth's comment.

"Alzheimer's," the attendant explained. "The last few months it's gotten pretty bad."

"Is he lucid?" Booth asked (Alzheimer's was one thing he was secretly fearing about old age; he could cope with losing his physical prowess, but he didn't want to start losing his faculties).

"He comes and goes," the attendant said, walking over to the old man. "Hey, Arthur. Some nice people are here to see you."

"Hey, Mr Graves," Booth said, showing the man his badge. "FBI special agent Seeley Booth. Listen, we got a court order here to get a dental imprint from you…"

As Bones leaned over to get Graves to bite down on the cast they'd brought, Graves turned and hissed at his partner, revealing a mouth that was completely empty of teeth.

"Oh, hey," the attendant said, stepping forward as Bones jumped back in shock. "Sorry, he's not like that usually; I think you may have frightened him."

"How did he loose his teeth?" Booth asked.

"They'd all been pulled when he got here," the nurse explained.

"Does he have any regular visitors?" Booth asked, seizing on the only thing left for them to explore.

"There used to be a man," the attendant replied. "He drove a motorcycle. I believe he may have been a nephew."

"We know who you are," Bones said, walking over to glare at Graves, clearly wanting to say her piece even if Graves was obviously incapable of responding to it. "We know what you did."

"Alright, Bones," Booth said, pulling his partner back; this guy might be old, but even if his memory of his close call with Marcus proved that old men could be dangerous, this guy was obviously in no state to do anything. "It's OK; let's go, check out his case file, see what kind of kids he could have recruited. Come on, let's go."

He tried to ignore the satisfied smirk on Graves's face as they left; mentally crippled or not, that was the smile of a man who believed that they had already failed, and he didn't have time to try and argue with a man who was clearly already unstable even before his brain basically gave out on him.

* * *

  
The idea of attending a parole hearing for someone he'd arrested wasn't something that Booth would have done normally- in most cases his arrests were cut and dried with no question about the suspect needing to be locked up- but considering that this was Bones's brother, he had felt as though he had to make the effort anyway.

"Judge Watkins," Caroline said, standing behind her chair while Russ and his parole officer sat in front of the desk, "Russ Brennan has already proven himself a flight risk."

"He's attached to his family," Russ's parole officer said.

"The same family he abandoned?" the judge pointed out.

"Temporarily," Russ said, automatically defensive of his past.

"When his little girl needed him, he returned without any regard for himself," the parole officer added, obviously wanting to prevent Russ saying anything that could incriminate him further.

"You're his Parole officer," Caroline said, glaring at the younger woman. "We're all here because you're the one who violated him."

"Only because it's the law, Ms Julian," the woman pointed out. "I have a lot of faith in Russ Brennan."

"Judge Watkins," Caroline said, turning away from the younger woman once more, "Russ Brennan not only broke his parole by fleeing the region, he is a material witness in an upcoming murder trial."

"That is a totally different issue that has nothing to do with this hearing," the other woman protested.

"This isn't a hearing," the judge corrected solemnly. "It's an informal meeting to decide whether there will _be_ a hearing."

"Can I say something?" Bones asked, raising her hand.

"That is a slippery slope, Judge Watkins," Caroline noted.

"Can I?" Russ asked.

"No," the judge said firmly.

"What?" Bones asked. "You said this was informal."

"I'm still the judge and I get to make those decisions," the judge clarified. "Agent Booth, what are your thoughts?"

"I got nothing to say, judge," Booth said; he was already in an awkward position for delaying Russ's arrest, so he wasn't going to exacerbate the issue by voicing his opinion on what should happen to him.

"Booth, please!" Bones said.

"I got a phone call from the Archbishop of D.C. fifteen minutes ago," the judge noted as he leaned forward over his desk. "He promises to take a personal interest in Mr. Brennan's rehabilitation."

"For God's sake, why?" Caroline asked.

"Also a psychiatrist, Doctor Lance Sweets, who says he believes Mr. Brennan will not flee the jurisdiction again," the judge continued, ignoring Caroline's question as he looked over Sweets' notes. "Plus a parole officer who's recommending _against_ revoking parole. Why should I ignore all that?"

"Because Ms. Davis will simply send Russ Brennan home," Caroline said firmly.

"That is not my intention," the parole officer said.

"It's not?" Russ asked.

"Mr. Brennan should be punished," she explained.

"How?" Caroline asked.

"Thirty days in county jail."

"What?" Bones said indignantly.

"That's nothing!" Caroline said (Booth pondered briefly how amusing it was; both women equally indignant for the completely opposite reason).

"Seems pretty harsh from where I sit," Russ noted.

"Also, eighteen months should be added to his parole," the parole officer continued. "And he should be forced to wear electronic monitoring."

"That is slightly more than nothing… but only slightly," Caroline said in frustration.

"I will register your opinion, Mrs. Julian, but that's my ruling," the judge said. "If I had a gavel, I'd bang it, but how about the last one out just slams the door?"

With that, the group all got up and left the room, Booth first out of the office only to get slapped in the arm by Caroline.

"Ouch!" he said, looking indignantly at the prosecutor.

"I want you to consider what side you're on," Caroline said, her voice low as she glared at him. "Bishops and psychiatrists and bleeding heart parole officers; that's what's wrong with the justice system in this country."

Deciding to avoid that issue as Caroline walked off, Booth gave Russ the chance to give Amy a hug and a brief kiss on the cheek before he spoke up.

"Russ, you gotta go with the marshals," he said, looking awkwardly at the couple.

"Thank you again," Bones said.

"I didn't do anything, again," Booth corrected her; he might have helped out off-the-record, but he couldn't exactly discuss that without putting himself in an officially awkward place…

"You should thank him too," Bones said, looking over at Amy.

"Why?" Amy asked, still standing beside Russ.

"He saved Russ," Bones said.

"I didn't do anything-" Booth began, before Amy suddenly ran over to give him a hug, leaving him with nothing to do but return the hug until she pulled away, at which point trying to clarify his position would have just seemed foolish at best. "OK, uh… Russ… time to go."

After Amy had given Russ's hand a last squeeze, Booth led him down the hall to the awaiting marshals, taking the opportunity to deliver one final warning.

"OK, here's the thing, Russ, alright?" he said, keeping his voice low as they walked. "You run again? You disappoint that woman and her kids and you break your sister's heart, I will-"

"Do something terrible, I got it," Russ said, looking at him in understanding.

"Yeah, I hope you do," Booth said, looking firmly at the other man.

He might not be prepared to release his inner Angelus on Russ, but he wanted to make sure that this man knew that he couldn't leave his sister hanging like that again, even if Russ would never know what he was _really_ capable of if he decided to let rip…


	53. The Santa in the Slush

"You got that sad little girl look on your face after you've been with your dad," Booth said, looking pointedly at his partner as they drove to their latest crime scene.

"No I don't…" Bones protested, whining in protest before she sighed in response to his knowing look. "He wishes we could spend Christmas together with Russ."

"Well, do it," Booth said; he'd so rarely managed to spend Christmas with his family as Angel- Christmas hadn't been as big a deal when he was Liam and he didn't really have much of a family to spend it with as Booth- that the idea of Bones missing that chance to go on a dig just seemed stupid to him.

"They're both in jail. It's impossible," Bones said indignantly, before looking curiously at him. "What are your plans?"

"I'm thinking about driving the truck right off the bridge," Booth said grimly, before he noted Bones's worried glance at him. "Oh, I'm being melodramatic and self pitying."

"You love Christmas," Bones said.

"I love it, you know, when I have Parker," Booth clarified (He'd been relatively dismissive of Christmas when he was Angelus and his first century or so as Angel, but his thoughts on the season had been fairly neutral when he started living in Sunnydale and after relocating to Los Angeles, so Parker was the main reason he liked it nowadays). "But this year he's going skiing in Vermont with Rebecca and Captain Fantastic."

"Who's Captain Fantastic?" Bones asked.

"Ah, it's her boyfriend," Booth said, rubbing his forehead to try and relieve some of the stress. "Commands a Coastguard cutter…"

"His last name isn't literally 'fantastic', is it?" Bones asked uncertainly.

"Might as well be," Booth said, before trying to change the subject; talking about Parker's potential stepfather was _not_ going to help his mood. "You know, they have a trailer at the jail, mostly for conjugal visits."

"Captain Fantastic is in jail?" Bones asked.

"No, your dad," Booth corrected; sometimes, he really wondered how Bones couldn't make social leaps as easily as she made bone-related jumps. "You can give him what he wants for Christmas; pull a few strings."

"I'm not a string puller," Bones protested.

"I've seen you pull some strings," Booth noted.

"My father is a murderer and a thief," Bones said firmly; evidently she didn't want to get into that kind of debate.

"Well, murderers and thieves, they get Christmas too," Booth said (He didn't count vampires and most demons in that statement; they didn't particularly care about the things Christmas was meant to represent anyway). "In fact, that's kinda the point."

"Well, I have other plans," Bones said.

"Well, whatever they are, skeletons and Christmas do not mix," Booth said.

"That's exactly what my father said," Bones noted, actually looking at him in surprise, as though that statement wasn't obvious. "Where are we going?"

"Early Christmas present for you, Bones," Booth responded. "Dead guy in a sewer."

* * *

  
"Can't sleep on your own couch?" Bones asked him as she walked into her office to find him lying on the couch, trying to get some rest.

"Just waiting for the squints to find out something," he replied, sitting up as he forced his sleep-addled mind to focus. "How did it go with Russ?"

"He says he doesn't want the girls to come," Bones said as she sat down on a chair opposite. It didn't take long for Booth to guess Russ's motives; he didn't want his step-daughters knowing that he was in prison.

"Your dad," he said, trying to focus on presenting the situation in a more positive manner, "he wants the whole Christmas package. You know - the tree, the kids, the presents - the whole shebang."

"Well, the whole shebang isn't possible," Bones said firmly.

"Christmas," Booth said, looking promptingly at her, "is about making the impossible possible."

He'd never really thought about that before that dark Christmas when the First had attacked, but seeing it snow that heavily in California had a way of reminding you that miracles could happen.

"You mean like you spending Christmas with Parker?" Bones asked.

"OK, you know what? That hurt," Booth said, briefly glaring at his partner before he turned over to try and get some more rest; things were rough enough right now without her rubbing that in his face. "Wake me up when the, uh, squint squad finds out something."

It wasn't the most mature solution, but he wasn't about to get into that kind of argument; it was the kind of debate that make it all too likely that he'd end up letting something slip about his real past…

* * *

  
"Kris rented this place from me for six years," Ralph Harley, the landlord of their current victim, reported to Booth and Bones as the FBI forensics team gathered evidence from the assorted toys and other items in the apartment; they were attempting to leave the toys and other memorabilia intact in case something interesting emerged later.

"Do you know where he lived before that?" Bones asked.

"Well, actually, Bones, that wasn't my first question," Booth began.

"He wrote his previous address on the lease," Ralph said, sounding slightly sheepish as he passed the file containing the lease to Booth's partner.

"North Pole?" she said, staring at the file incredulously.

"Aw, come on with that…" Booth groaned; this guy was either one of the rare supernatural creatures he didn't believe in, or someone had _serious_ mental issues…

"See?" Bones said, indicating the file as she looked at him. "It turned out to be a good question!"

"You actually accepted that address?" Booth asked, wanting to focus on the matter at hand.

"Are you kidding?" Ralph pointed out. "How many guys want to live above a toy store? It's noisy. And Kris gave me first and last month's rent, upfront, in cash."

"Kris Kringle, from the North Pole, lives above a toystore," Bones noted. "This is further evidence that our victim is indeed the mythic figure known as Santa Claus."

"Mythic," Booth repeated firmly; he couldn't believe Bones was even _joking_ about this. "Coming from the Latin 'Myth', meaning 'doesn't actually exist'."

As Bones countered with some kind of more scientifically accurate description about the origin of 'myth' as a term, the two of them were about to start arguing, but the sight of Ralph looking at them both in amusement cut that conversation off before it could go too far; getting into that kind of debate wouldn't help them solve the case.

"What can you tell us about Mr. Kringle's personal finances?" Booth asked.

"Like I said, he always paid cash," Ralph said.

"Where did he work?" Bones asked.

"Uh, employment agency called 'Temp Time'," Ralph said after a moment's thought. "On 7th, by the Convention Center."

"Ha!" Booth said firmly. "Couldn't have been Santa!"

"Why?" his partner asked.

"Because Santa wouldn't have worked at a temp agency!"

"Well, why not?" Bones asked. "His work is seasonal-"

"Because he would-" Booth began, but quickly halted himself as he registered Ralph still watching them; arguments would have to wait until later if they were ever going to make progress. "Kringle pay his rent on time?"

"Always, at least until the last couple of months," Ralph said.

"Really?" Booth said, moving over to indicate the large amount of cash they'd found during their search. "Because, ya know what, obviously he wasn't short on funds with all the money we found in the secret compartment of his drawer."

"Son of a bitch," Ralph said, staring at the money. "Twelve hundred bucks of that is mine!"

"All of this is rumpled small bills, except for these eight fifty dollar bills," Bones said, holding up the bag with the relevant bills.

"Brand new with sequential serial numbers," Booth noted,

"I don't know about any of this," Ralph protested.

"Alright, look," Booth said, reaching over to take a hold of Ralph's shoulder; the man looked like he was about to start getting jumpy, and he wanted to head that off as quickly as possible. "Did you, uh, guys have some kind of a disagreement? Is that why he was holding out on you?"

"No," Ralph said, too quickly for it to be the honest answer. "No. No. Maybe… Kris gave me some ideas on a toy, which I patented and…"

"It sold?" Bones asked.

"Somebody took a picture of TomKat's kid with it so, it sorta took off," Ralph confirmed.

"Wow," Booth said, whistling at the thought; celebrity culture might bemuse him at times, but he could appreciate how it worked even if he didn't always get why even after spending so much time with Lorne. "Kringle could have sued you for a chunk of that cash."

"He never actually told me he wanted a cut," Ralph pointed out. "Maybe, he just stopped paying his rent."

It gave them some interesting clues, but Booth was starting to think that this apartment was a bust; they were still no further along in determining why someone would have wanted their victim dead…

* * *

  
"Thinking of Parker?" Bones asked as they drove away from Kringle's apartment, considering what they'd put together so far.

"No," Booth said, sitting in silence as they continued driving along before he decided to break the silence. "Thinking about your dad?"

"No," Bones responded. "Russ."

"Well, you can't blame him for not wanting those girls to know the truth…" Booth noted.

"He's living a lie," Bones said indignantly. "You'd never do that."

Booth suddenly felt hideously ashamed of himself; Bones could have no idea that he was lying to her pretty much every time she asked him about his past, but it wasn't like she'd ever _believe_ the truth…

"Well, not never," he said, wanting to avoid giving Bones a false impression of himself even if he still couldn't be completely honest. "I mean, I-I lie to Parker… especially this time of year."

"What about?" Bones asked.

"Tell him that Santa's coming," Booth clarified.

"Really?"

"It's Santa Claus!" Booth protested.

"The Santa myth is based on blackmail," Bones said (At least she was actually starting to act like she didn't believe the victim was Santa any more). "Be good or you won't get any presents."

"No," Booth said, suddenly feeling the need to defend this particular lie (As well as any excuse not to think about the demon Santa Claws; that particular mess was one part of his old reality that he was glad to leave behind in favour of the myth). "It's not a _lie_ lie, Bones; it's more like everybody agreeing that up to a certain age, kids deserve to live a different kind of truth."

"OK," Bones said dismissively, "by that reasoning, what we should do is figure out a lie Russ could tell the girls so they wouldn't know he's in jail."

"That is a _brilliant_ Christmas idea!" Booth said, smiling at his partner in what he hoped was an encouraging manner.

"It was intended to be a scathing and incisive comment," Bones countered, clearly confused at his response.

"Give Russ civvies," Booth said, ignoring the anthropologist's retort. "The girls think he's flown in specially to visit his father in jail at Christmas."

"Where would you say he's been?" Bones asked.

"Building a bridge in… Addis Ababa," Booth said; he thought he recalled Wes mentioning the name once…

"Addis Ababa is the land-locked capitol of Ethiopia," Bones pointed out.

"Fine, Bones," Booth said, deciding to give up on offering suggestions; if she wouldn't accept his help, he couldn't exactly force her to do so. "You know what? Just make up your own lie."

"I don't believe in lying to children," Bones protested.

"You just want to go to Peru without feeling guilty, alright?"

"You need to accept that you won't have Parker this Christmas."

"I am not enjoying this holiday season at all," Booth groaned in frustration after a moment's silence, each of them lost for better words.

"Yeah, well, neither am I," Bones said, her voice low as she stared out of the window.

* * *

  
"Look, you ever see this man before?" Booth asked, holding up a photograph of their latest victim to a waiter from the Chinese restaurant that led to the alley they were currently searching (He just wanted to get out of this place and find something else; he'd been in more than enough alleys in his darker phase after that doughnut shop death).

"Santa Claus?" the waiter said sceptically.

"No… this isn't actually Santa Claus," Booth said, tapping the picture impatiently. "The guy that's wearing the Santa outfit in this picture; have you ever seen him?"

"Can I see your ID again, please?" the waiter asked, clearly doubtful about this whole story

"Booth," Hodgins said, standing up from the dumpster just as Booth was reaching for his ID.

"What?" Booth asked.

"Your kid like roaches?" the entomologist asked, holding up his right hand to indicate the roach on his finger. "Gromphadorhina, man. Hissing roach. Hey, grab me this container? This is a great pet, man; perfect Christmas gift…"

"What- no," Booth said, protesting even as he provided Hodgins with the requested container; not only did he fail to understand the appeal of cockroaches as pets, but he _really_ didn't want an additional reminder of the time he'd lived in alleys. "Did you find the Bird's Nest maggots yet?"

"No, not yet; still looking," Hodgins replied, before he turned back to the dumpster, sounding disturbing enthusiastic about the whole process.

"OK, I'm calling the cops-" the waiter said as he began to turn back.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, pal; hey, I am the cops, alright?" Booth said, looking firmly at the man; maybe he'd get rid of the unwanted questions if he asserted himself a bit more. "Any, uh, fights out back here in the alley in the past four days?"

"No," the waiter said. "I-I don't come out here since I quit smoking. It stinks."

"It's the cycle of life, my friend," Hodgins called out from the dumpster. "Quite beautiful if you get into it."

"Is it?" Booth asked, laughing sceptically before turning back to the waiter. "OK, you go back inside but tell the rest of your staff I'll be in in a few minutes to ask them some questions… and you'd better hope I don't report this to the health department," he added, holding up the jar containing the roach as the waiter muttered something in Chinese as he walked away.

"Paydirt!" Hodgins yelled, emerging from the dumpster with a food container as he pulled off his gas mask. "Fannia, Musca and Phoridae and these are the exact maggots I found on Kringle's suit. This means this is where he was killed."

"So if he was killed here," Booth said, taking a new assessment of the alley around them before moving to a grate on the other side, shoving a couple of boxes out of the way to examine it more closely, "then he was probably… dragged over here, to this grate… and dumped down this sewer."

"An ignominious end for Father Christmas, huh…" Hodgins began, before being distracted by something else in the dumpster. "Whoa."

"Whoa what?" Booth asked, just as Hodgins emerged holding three wallets.

"They were near the bottom," the scientist explained, quickly examining his new find. "No cash; just IDs and credit."

"Probably dumped there by pickpockets," Booth noted.

"Hey, you found cash in Kringle's apartment, right?" Hodgins asked.

"Right," Booth said, quickly following Hodgins' train of thought.

"Maybe he picked one pocket too many?" Hodgins suggested, as he put the three wallets in the evidence bag Booth held out for him.

"Well," the agent said, nodding in acknowledgement of Hodgins' point, "we're gonna find out the owners and, uh, see if they know any Santa pick pockets."

With the evidence found, he quickly decided to back out of the area before Hodgins could start to ask for help; he liked the guy well enough, but he'd spent far too long 'dumpster-diving' when he was in his more self-destructive phase to want to have to deal with _that_ smell again any more than was absolutely necessary…

* * *

  
As far as cases went, this had definitely been one of the stranger murders he'd investigated as Booth (That mess with _Smile Time_ remained his strangest; it might have been fundamentally humiliating for him more than anything else, but in hindsight it had been amusing to look like a vampire puppet). Dealing with a case where the victim appeared to be Santa would have been strange on its own, but when it concluded with a bunch of Santas accusing one of their own of murder like he'd disgraced some kind of uniform…

The only good think about that bizarre sight was that it helped him not think about the earlier kiss he'd shared with Bones. Whether it was for a bet with Caroline or not, the whole thing just made him uncomfortable; even if the kiss had been good in itself, he was keeping so many things secret from her about his real past that just thinking of taking anything further felt… _wrong_ …

Still, right now he had far more pleasant thoughts to occupy his time; Parker had stayed behind to be with him for Christmas, and now the two of them were about to do what they could to give Bones and her family the best kind of Christmas they could manage.

" _Oh my God_ ," Bones' voice said as she picked up the phone, evidently wincing at something distasteful.

"What's wrong?" Booth asked.

" _What is that_?" Bones said, sounding like she was talking to someone else; he heard someone respond, but it was too far from the phone for him to be sure what they'd said before she turned back to the phone. " _Booth_?"

"Bones, hey!" he said, glad that they had so easily moved back into their usual routine after that kiss Caroline had requested as he reached down to give his son a one-armed hug. "Good news; turns out I got Parker for Christmas after all."

" _Christmas magic, right_?" Bones replied.

"Hey, so we figured we call and uh, wish you a little, uh, Yuletide cheer," Booth said, lowering the phone down to Parker so that his son could wish his partner a merry Christmas as well before lifting the phone back to his ear.

" _My dad says 'Merry Christmas'_ ," Bones said.

"Hey, listen, Bones," Booth said, checking the car engine to ensure that everything was wired up; setting this up wasn't easy, but he felt it was the least he could do for Bones's first family Christmas in sixteen years. "I got a little something for ya."

" _Oh, I got you something too_ ," Bones said. " _We can exchange gifts in a couple of days_."

"Go to the window and open up the blinds, now," Booth said. Bones briefly sounded confused at the question, but nevertheless obeyed his instructions as the trailer window opened, revealing him and Parker standing by the illuminated Christmas tree. As she turned back to the rest of the people in the trailer, Booth couldn't hear what she was saying to them but the gathering of faces around the window made it clear that they appreciated the effort, Parker waving to the family gathered together in the trailer.

" _I love my gift, Booth_ ," Bones said, clearly satisfied with this addition to her family Christmas celebrations.

"Merry Christmas, Bones," Booth said.

It was a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but as he'd once noted, in a meaningless world, a single act of kindness could be the greatest thing imaginable…


	54. The Man in the Mud

"We're not sure about time of death yet," Bones noted, as the two of them discussed their latest case during their current session with Sweets; if they were going to be stuck with the guy for the foreseeable future, they might as well try and make use of his insight.

"It was definitely a murder," Booth added, wondering what it was about this case that was making Sweets look so bored; this _had_ to be more interesting than discussing issues that only the psychiatrist seemed to feel were actually there…

"Definitely," Bones confirmed. "Probably by two assailants."

"What a shock for that couple, huh?" Booth said, smiling over at his partner. "You know, they slide naked, into the hot mud bath, and a skeleton hand pokes her in the-"

"Anus," Bones interjected.

"Bones!" Booth said, smiling at her choice of term.

"What?" the anthropologist said. "It's a clinical term for that part of the body, Booth."

"Doctor Brennan, Agent Booth…" Sweets said, looking between them with an overly shocked expression, "would it be fair to say that you use work to avoid confronting personal issues?"

"What?" Booth said, unable to believe Sweets was bringing up such a random topic. "Because I don't want to talk about…"

"The anus," Bones finished.

"You really like that word, don't you?" Booth said.

"Do you two ever discuss anything that's not attached to work?" Sweets asked.

"Well, it's better than talking about, y'know…" Booth began.

"The anus?" Sweets finished.

"What is it with you two?" Booth protested.

"Well, Sweets could be right," Bones noted. "I mean, we talk a lot about work."

"I talk about my kid," Booth pointed out, rejecting that idea.

"Because he was almost kidnapped during a case," Sweets said (Booth really wished he could legally hit Sweets for that; he'd mentioned Parker to Bones _before_ Epps had gone after him, and they'd never once mentioned the whole Epps thing after his sessions with Gordon Gordon when discussing how things were with him, Parker and Rebecca).

"My father," Bones noted, raising a finger. "We talk a lot about him."

"Because Agent Booth arrested him for murder," Sweets noted.

"Mmm…" Booth said, debating whether they should point out all the discussions they'd had about her family history before and after the arrest before deciding he didn't want to give Sweets any more 'ammunition' than he had already. "OK, what are you trying to get at here?"

"Your inability to share your personal lives," Sweets said. "I thought that was obvious."

"OK, that was snotty," Booth said, glaring slightly at the younger man. "I don't respond well to snotty."

"After a case," Bones put in, leaning over to lay a hand on Booth's arm, "sometimes we have a drink, or coffee, Booth has pie. I don't...like pie."

"You really should just give it a chance," Booth said, glad for the new topic.

"I find it too sweet," Bones replied.

"OK, there," Booth said, smiling at Sweets. "We talked about pie. Nothin' to do with work."

"It… is better when we discuss murder," Bones noted, leaving Booth suddenly feeling awkward about this conversation; he didn't specifically agree with the idea that he and Bones had a poor dynamic outside of work, but it was hard to argue with any of Sweets' points…

"I'd like to see you guys in a social situation," Sweets said. "A situation where work is a taboo subject."

"What, are you gonna send us to a restaurant and watch us through a one-way mirror?" Booth asked; sometimes he wondered if Sweets _needed_ to do most of these tests or if he was just screwing around to try and live vicariously through them…

"I'm still not having pie," Bones began.

"No," Sweets interjected. "An evening out with my girlfriend and me."

Booth couldn't resist the temptation to chuckle at that; one thing he enjoyed about his life as Booth was the ability to make these kind of jokes without people worrying that 'Angel' was having some kind of breakdown…

"They need someone to buy them beer," he noted to his partner.

"You want us to go on a double date?" Bones asked.

"Why don't you go on the internet like all the rest of the kids?" Booth added.

"OK," Sweets said, ignoring their arguments. "If it goes well, I'll withdraw my concern. I'll release you back into your environment."

"What are we; brook trout?" Booth asked.

"Fine," Bones said, pouting briefly in frustration, which Booth simply sighed as he picked up a small stress-sumo-wrestler figure from the table.

"Agent Booth?" Sweets asked, looking pointedly at him. "Unless… you think that's too much to prove."

"Fine," Booth said, making a face in frustration as he tossed the doll at the psychiatrist. "I'll show 'em I have nothing to prove. Bring it on, Sweets."

He hated having to jump through hoops for this kid who couldn't hope to understand half of the things he'd been through in his life, but if it let him continue his work with Bones, he'd put up with it…

* * *

  
"I'm enjoying this," Bones noted as she worked away at the pot she was currently making in their ceramics class. "The last time I threw pots I was in Colombia with the Auroco Indians."

"Last time I did something like this, I was in nursery school," Booth noted. Even if the memory he'd spoken of was faked, he wasn't that keen on pottery as an artistic expression due to the relative lack of influence he had over the materials, but his old drawing skills weren't something Seeley Booth would have developed, and he was mainly here to go along with Sweets rather than anything else.

"Well, we love it," the woman who'd been introduced to them as April said firmly. "Don't we, Lance?"

"Yes," Sweets said, in a tone that suggested he was exaggerating his interest.

"Well," Booth put in, "I love my work, but I'm not going to talk about that right now, even though we think a paraplegic killed Tripp Goddard."

"That sounds fascinating," April said, looking curiously at him.

"April?" Sweets said, prompting a forced giggle and exaggerated apology from the other woman.

"Doctor Sweets says that you work with tropical fish," Bones noted.

"Yes, I love fish," April said with a smile. "They're just like people."

"No, no, they're not, actually," Bones said, looking at her in confusion. "People can't breathe underwater."

"She's funny," April said, her laugh prompting a similar smile from Booth despite his best intentions.

"I am?" Bones asked. "What? Why is that funny?"

"I don't think she meant that literally, Bones," Booth said.

"It's their eyes," April explained. "You can tell so much from eyes."

"In humans, the retinal scan is as specific as a fingerprint-" Bones began, evidently missing the point.

"No, no," April clarified. "Their souls. You can see their little souls."

"I don't understand," Bones said uncertainly. "You believe that fish have souls?"

"Yes," April said, as though it was obvious. "You can see it in their coloring; it's a reflection of who they are."

"Their coloring has developed over millennia as a way to deal with predators," Bones said, clearly confused at April's point.

"April just means they're beautiful," Sweets said.

"Don't tell me what I mean, Lance," April said, looking firmly at him. "I mean they have souls."

"Ah… OK," Sweets said.

"Hey, look what I'm makin'!" Booth said, smiling up at the group as he revealed his clay horse; the finer details still needed some work, but he was definitely making some progress at this end…

"You've done this before," Bones noted.

"Nah…" Booth said, unwilling to go into his artistic history at this point.

"You have," Bones said.

"You really think that's good?" Booth asked; clay was something he'd only dabbled in before, but he was still glad to know that he could make an interesting impression with art.

"Yes, very," Bones said.

"Yours is good too, April," Sweets noted, clearly trying to make up for their earlier argument.

"I'm not talking to you," April said in a low voice, prompting an awkward snicker from Sweets. "You think that's funny."

"Are they fighting?" Bones asked Booth, giving him a stage whisper.

"Just focus on your pot there," Booth said, wanting to stay out of this conversation; he wasn't going to convince Sweets to stay out of his social life by butting into the psychiatrist's…

"I'm with patients, April," Sweets said.

"Nope; no patients tonight," Booth said, even as he continued his own work. "Just us people makin' pots."

"You can't apologise for me, Lance," April said, looking up at him with a firm glare.

"Can we please just move on?" Sweets asked.

"No," April said with a shake of her head. "It just- I meant that, I believe that all creatures, people, fish, dogs, we're all connected. We all share the same stuff that makes life so beautiful and precious."

"On a quantum level, that's true, although the word 'stuff' is not accurate," Bones noted thoughtfully (Booth wasn't entirely sure if that applied, considering that demons definitely didn't share that same quality considering what some of them were capable of, but this was far from the time to bring up the existence of demons to refute a pleasant woman's somewhat naïve views).

"See?" April said, looking gratefully at Bones before shooting a scathing glare at Sweets, slamming a towel on the table to emphasise her point.

"What?" Sweets protested. "I have great respect for your fish. Admittedly, I might relate to other things more."

"He kills about a thousand people a night," April said, looking over at Bones.

"Yeah, in a video game, April," Sweets said as Bones looked at him in surprise. "They're not real."

"Hey, Sweets," Booth said, indicating the psychiatrist's now-faltering pot; he'd been so busy talking he'd lost track of his project. "Your thing there's droopy."

As Sweets examined his faltering pot, Booth indicated his own finished model with a smile, allowing the rest to express their thoughts on it before he picked up a stray piece of clay and tossed it at Bones, starting a small 'clay fight' that at least managed to make the night more amusing than it had been (The moment when April threw clay at Sweets' face was a bit of a mood-killer, but otherwise it was just amusing).

* * *

  
"I tell you one thing," Booth noted as he and Bones drove into work after last night's disastrous and bizarre 'dinner date', "Sweets didn't get any last night."

"They're too young to be in a serious relationship," Bones said sceptically. "In agrarian societies, young couplings made sense; the partnership was for survival, but today…"

"You know, you can play the field but not plough it," Booth said, not wanting to hear her debate about young relationships any more than he had to; the last thing he needed was for her to start sprouting statistics that left him hitting himself for being a bad partner to Buffy and Cordelia all over again (They'd missed their chance because of outside circumstances; he _knew_ they could have made it work if things had been different)…

"That was distasteful," Bones said.

"What?" Booth said, already regretting his choice of words; he'd just over-reacted because he didn't want to think about what she'd brought up.

"I like April, though," Bones noted.

"She talks to fish, OK?" Booth said. "I'm with Sweets on this one."

He knew that he'd crossed a line or two, but it was better to present a negative image right now than risk talking about something that might end up giving away something important about his past if he got into an argument…

* * *

  
"Excuse me, we're here about a mudbath?" Smalls said, looking at him uncertainly as they sat in the interrogation room.

"No," Booth corrected, "we've got a sworn statement here from Garth Jodrey that Philippa Fitz took him to the mud hole three years ago."

"To have sex," Bones added.

"The same mudhole that Tripp was dumped in," Booth continued.

"I could give you a sworn statement that Garth took me to that mud hole," Philippa said.

"Oho, I slid that one right by her," Booth said.

"What?" Philippa asked.

"You just admitted that you had prior knowledge to the location of a mud hole," Smalls clarified.

"No changies," Bones said.

"No takebacks," Bones added.

"Answer nothing without prior confirmation from me," Smalls protested.

"You killed Tripp because your father was about to sign the company over to him," Booth said.

"What?" Philippa asked.

"Don't respond in any way," Smalls informed her.

"We have DNA evidence that shows that you swung the prybar into Tripp's head," Booth said.

"According to the forensic report, the sample was very small, and was totally used up during the course of the test," Smalls noted.

"It's an accurate test," Bones countered.

"But it can't be repeated," Smalls said, sounding far too satisfied for someone who knew that he was defending an actual murderer (Seriously, Gunn had received a legal upgrade from the worst lawyers in existence and he'd still refused to take morally questionable cases unless the client had threatened darker consequences if he lost). "And my client has a twin brother. Juries hate DNA evidence and twins. What's that sound? I believe that's reasonable doubt startin' its engines."

"We have evidence that the same prybar was used to sabotage Tripp's motorcycle," Bones said, ignoring Smalls' protests.

"A common tool left in a semi-public area?" Smalls countered. "In a situation that could have arisen from incompetence rather than sabotage?"

"You sabotaged the bike to kill Tripp, but he signed the contract before he could ride the bike and die the way he was supposed to," Booth said, looking grimly at Philippa, ignoring Smalls' attempt to provoke him; he knew that they were dealing with limited evidence, but he'd put the case together and he was going to speak his piece.

"So, you killed him with a prybar, loaded him onto his own truck, and dumped him in the mud puddle," Bones continued.

"Everything was great until your brother rode the bike that you sabotaged," Booth noted.

"You don't ride someone else's bike; Danny knew that!" Philippa protested, clearly struggling not to cry at the memory of what her mistake had done to her brother.

"Philippa…" Smalls said warningly.

"You killed him," Bones said solemnly. "Accidentally, but you did kill him."

"I loved my brother…" Philippa said weakly.

"Don't speak, please," Smalls said as he stood up. "Are we free to go, or would you like to waste some more of the taxpayers' money?"

"She did it!" Bones protested.

"You may get a prosecutor to lay a murder charge, but a jury will never bring home this baby the way you want it to," Smalls said, placing his hands on Philippa's shoulders.

"You're right," Booth noted, nodding briefly at Smalls before he put his files away. "But I'm still gonna make the arrest."

"To what end?" Smalls asked. "You can't win!"

"We let everybody know what Philippa did, including her father," Booth said firmly.

Maybe they couldn't get a conviction, and maybe Philippa had only set out to commit one murder rather than two, but that wasn't the issue right now; what mattered was that she had to answer for what she'd done.

Even if she wouldn't actually be punished for it, people would _know_ what she'd done in the end; that was all that really mattered to him right now.


	55. Player Under Pressure

Investigating crimes on a campus would have prompted some memories of the time he'd spent helping Buffy and the other Scoobies deal with the various crimes and demons drawn to Sunnydale High, but after hearing Bones's story about the low lecture attendance she'd received, Booth knew that he had to come up with something that fit in with his new, more 'human' past; he couldn't afford to make a mistake right now.

"Oh, hey," he said, smiling slightly as he followed Bones behind the bleachers where their latest body had apparently been discovered, grateful that an appropriate story from Booth's past came to mind for this situation. "Y'know, last time I was under the bleachers, I was, uh, getting ready to smoke a cigarette and make out with Vanessa Taylor."

"I didn't know you smoked," Bones noted as she pulled on her gloves while he toyed with a basketball he'd picked up earlier.

"Eighth grade, Bones," Booth said (He wasn't going to discuss what Angelus had done after regaining control following that first night with Buffy, or what he'd done during that bleak period after Darla's resurrection, but that didn't mean he had to lie completely about what he'd done in the past). "C'mon, didn't you ever get naughty with a jock under the bleachers?"

"Wait; you were a jock?" Bones asked.

"Well, you know, you had to be one if you wanted to make out with Vanessa Taylor," Booth said, once again disturbingly grateful for the distraction from his fictitious past when they found the liquefied remains covered in flies and maggots; it looked like the corpse had been crushed behind the bleachers into the grate on the wall, the bones seemingly pulverised judging by the limp condition of the clothes and flesh that he could see, which at least gave him a reason to stop talking. "What is it?"

"Male," Bones said, sniffing slightly as she put her bag to the side and crouched down. "Smell that?"

"You're kidding," Booth said; he didn't need his old senses to smell _this_ body…

"Well, I don't mean decomp," Bones said. "Alcohol."

"Vagrant passes out by the heating grate and somebody closes up the bleachers," Booth said; he didn't like to sound dismissive too often, but this particular problem looked like it should be relatively straightforward…

The sound of squeaks coming from the body startled Booth before his partner picked up the resulting rat by its tail.

"That would account for the accelerated decomp," the anthropologist noted, pulling back some of the clothing to double-check the corpse. "And the babies."

"Baby rats?" Booth said, leaning over to examine the small pink baby rodents.

"Yeah," Bones said. "We'll need them."

"'Kay," Booth said. "Yeah, uh… Chief Cutler, you got a rat carrier?"

"Yeah," the other man said. "I'll find something."

"We'll need the floor," Bones added.

"The floor?" Booth said incredulously.

"And whatever got pushed through that grate," his partner continued.

"Here you go," Cutler said, walking up to them with a large blue gym bag. "This do?"

"Yeah, that'll be great," Booth said. "Just put that rat there in the rat motel and we're good to go."

"We'll need to take the pinkies or they'll die," Bones added.

"Yeah, 'cause the world needs more rats," Booth said, suddenly noticing the ring on Cutler's finger, the ring inspiring 'Booth' memories that at least prevented him saying something from his 'Angel' memories. "Eighty-two Champs… Eighty-two Champs? Let me see that ring?"

Examining the ring more closely, it took a moment for Booth's 'donated' memories of college football to kick in- he'd tried to do some research in his spare time to reinforce the false memories, but there was only so much time he could spare now that he was restricted to a human sleeping pattern- but once they came back to him, Booth was amazed it had slipped his mind. "Wait a minute… Chief Cutler, as in Jack 'Cutter' Cutler?"

"Yeah," Cutler said with an awkward smile. "Haven't heard that one in a while."

"Ha!" Booth said; even if the memories of his life as Booth were fake, they were always better than remembering his time eating rats in the sewers like he had been at that point in his life. "Bones! You're looking at the star point guard for one of the best college basketball teams, ever!"

"Huh," Bones said.

"Drafted by the Detroit Pistons," Booth continued, looking at the man in appreciation.

"Knees blew out," Cutler said dismissively; his response was brief, but at least he didn't sound too resentful of the topic Booth had brought up. "Ended my career."

"Booth," Bones said, picking something up from the corpse before Booth had to decide how best to respond to that comment.

"Yeah?" he said, glancing back to see his partner holding a chain, a number eleven dangling from it. "Eleven?"

"Oh my God, no," Cutler said, shaking his head grimly.

"What?" Bones asked.

"Hey," Booth said, looking over at the other man as he recognised the relevance of the chain, "did he wear one of these?"

"He never took it off," Cutler confirmed.

"Who?" Bones asked.

"R.J. Manning," Booth explained for his partner. "He's one of the best college forwards in the conference. I mean, he was destined to be the number one pick."

"I don't know what that means," Bones said, in her usual blunt manner, "but if this is Manning, that's not going to happen."

His partner's assessment of the situation was a grim one, but at least they now knew whose death they were dealing with…

* * *

  
"I can give you a few pointers, Bones," Booth said, as he and his partner tossed a basketball around the college gymnasium while waiting for their next suspects to be available for interrogation. "Colby doesn't get out of class for a few minutes. You've gotta sort of flip your wrist you see, like this?"

Demonstrating the manoeuvre, Booth smiled in satisfaction as he took the shot and tossed it through the hoop; it was a minor thing, but when he'd spent so long developing less conventional skills, it was nice to know that he could pull off normal as well.

"Sports should not have such a priority in the university," Bones said, shaking her head as he ran forward to grab the ball.

"Alright, you know what?" Booth said, turning back to look at his partner. "That's crazy."

"No," Bones said. "Anthropologically speaking, sports are a way for boys to practice their battle skills."

"Yeah, OK," Booth said, shaking his head to try and dismiss that issue; he preferred to think of sport as an opportunity to maintain physical fitness in a society where manual labour was less of a necessity than it had been when he was alive. "So you want to just focus straight up, get up on your toes and just sluff…"

"The truth is athletes are basically emotionally arrested in boyhood," Bones said, even as Booth scored a rapid series of baskets while she talked, "acting out childish games as if they have adult importance. The only thing more juvenile are grown adults who watch sports."

"Why do you gotta say stuff like that?" Booth asked, cutting off his repeated scoring of basketball hoops to look at his partner.

"What?" Bones said, arms folded as she looked at him. "You mean the truth?"

"Alright," Booth said, rounding on Bones as he put the ball down at her feet. "You know what? I'm a jock. So when you say those, you know, things that you say, what are you saying about me?"

It was a stretch, but the idea of sport serving as a modern form of conflict was enough to get him thinking about everything he'd had to give up after he became Seeley Booth, his years of training as Angel irrelevant now that Booth didn't have the strength to hold his own in that field any more…

"Nothing," Bones said. "You grew out of it."

"No, I didn't, all right?" Booth said, going for the best explanation he could think of off the top of his head. "My shoulder crapped out on me. Otherwise, I would have gone all the way with it."

"What?" Bones said.

"You know what, and another thing, alright?" Booth continued, wanting to say something truthful after bringing up such a significant lie as he picked up his jacket and walked out of the gymnasium. "I fought in a war! So if sports is a 'childish substitute'? I can live with that."

As he left the court, he was privately relieved that at least that part of his statement was true; even if he missed the difference he could make as Angel, he'd be far happier in a world where people only competed against each other in sport rather than open conflict….

* * *

  
"One of you is taking steroids and the other one is being treated for the clap," Booth said as he addressed their current two suspects in the interrogation room.

"Somebody tested positive for steroids?" Jimmy Fields said in shock

"Ah," Booth said, indicating the speaker in satisfaction. "Thank you for your candor, Jimmy; thank you."

"I didn't admit anything, I asked a question," Jimmy objected.

"That's great," Booth said. "The guy on steroids would be worried about steroids; the guy with the clap- that would be you, Eddie- wouldn't worry."

"Well, why worry?" Ed said. "It's just a shot in the ass."

"Thank you, Ed, I appreciate it," Booth said; he didn't entirely approve of the guy being so casual about his health, but at least he hadn't gone out to actively use drugs like his compatriot. "You can leave now."

"Why can he leave?" Jimmy protested.

"I really don't care about where he's been dipping his, you know, wick, alright; I care about illegal steroids," Booth clarified. "Get lost, Ed. Leave."

"What's steroids go to do with what happened to R.J.?" Jimmy asked, after the clearly confused Ed had left the interrogation room.

"Oh, I don't know," Booth replied as he sat down. "Maybe R.J. is just worried about the, uh, the side effects. You know, all the, uh, the yelling and screaming, you know, the zits on his pretty face, his…manhood shrinking. So maybe he just gets nervous and he wants to confess to Coach Morse."

"What, so I kill him?" Jimmy asked, Booth shrugging in response; he knew that people could do foolish things for power after some of the stories he'd heard about how sires could 'convince' others to turn, but it still made him feel sick to think of what people would do without thinking long-term. "That's crazy! R.J. made me look good enough to go to… Europe leagues! Maybe even the NBA! You can't even prove I'm on steroids."

"Nah, nah, see," Booth said, pulling out the appropriate sheet of paper and sliding it across the table. "I execute this warrant to check you for steroids, uh, it's a paper trail and it becomes public knowledge my friend."

"I'll lose my eligibility," Jimmy said, his tone weak as he considered the implications.

"Bingo," Booth said, taking out a sample cup as he continued. "So you tell me who provided you with the steroids and this stays between you and me, or, uh… you gotta pee in a cup."

"C'mon, man…" Jimmy protested weakly.

"Oh, and this time I'm going to have to watch you pee in a cup," Booth added; if he could just make this guy see sense and recognise that confessing would be easier, they might be able to get through this mess without it becoming _too_ embarrassing. "I hope you don't have a bashful bladder."

* * *

  
"Do you know why we're doing this?" Booth asked Dallas Verona, the last girl in the cheerleading squad in the queue waiting to be tested for the clap.

"I can guess," Dallas said, raising her eyebrows and folding her arms in frustration.

"We found evidence that one of the cheerleaders might have been with R.J. before he died," Bones said. "Sexually."

"I know what 'been with' means," Dallas said bluntly.

"You know the DNA will tell us if it was you," Booth noted, deciding to test the waters.

"It wasn't," Dallas said, her manner still blunt.

"Why isn't she upset?" Bones asked, looking over at Booth in confusion after taking a moment to process that news.

"Oh, please," Dallas said, rolling her eyes. "Oh, I get it. You think because R.J. compulsively played around, I might have lured him to his death or something?"

"Wow, she's smart," Bones said.

"Mmm," Booth noted. "Well, do you want to pick out anyone in particular here?"

"Did you see R.J.?" Dallas asked, scoffing dismissively. "Before he was dead, I mean? He was a very good looking guy. You factor in his sex drive and how he played…half these girls have done him. Hell, he even did the towel girl."

"Great," Booth said, as Bones looked contemplatively at the younger woman, clearly trying to understand what this woman felt about her life. "Do you know about Justine Berry?"

"R.J. liked girls," Dallas said. "All kinds of girls. I'm just one kind."

"Which kind is that?" Bones asked.

"The permanent kind," the cheerleader said firmly.

Booth could understand that definition even if he didn't like to think about it; he was disturbingly reminded of his and Spike's relationship with Drusilla, even if they'd never even managed to define whether he or Spike would have been the 'permanent' one in that relationship (Darla had never been interested in doing anything with Spike to his recollection; she admired his skill at killing, but she was notoriously picky about her sexual partners).

"You planned to live like that?" Bones asked.

"R.J. came home to me," Dallas explained. "That's the way it would have stayed. From his crappy student apartment to the giant mansion he would have gotten."

As the girl turned away while tearing up, Booth was left in a rare situation for a murder investigation; facing a potential suspect that he knew couldn't have committed the crime whom he still had absolutely no sympathy for whatsoever.

* * *

  
Walking into the gymnasium to confront Cutler, Booth knew even at a distance that the man they were here to talk to was at least not going to be the kind of suspect who ran away when they tried to get a confession from him; it was just harder to be sure what he'd do _instead_ …

"Just a moment," he said to Bones, before addressing Cutler from across the room. "Hey, Chief."

"If I hadn't spat on that son of a bitch, you never would have caught me, right?" Cutler asked, as he sat solemnly on the bleachers where they had discovered the body.

"Well, Celeste might have told us," Bones noted.

"She doesn't know," Cutler said, starting to break down in tears as he spoke, the formerly strong man breaking down as he made his confession. "I came in and saw my little girl, saw her with R.J.… doing what she was doing. She heard me and took off. None of the girls could resist R.J. Kid had it all. Magic boy. You know what else he had? The clap. And he knew that when he took my daughter underneath the blea-"

As Cutler broke down crying, he reached into his bag and pulled out a gun, Booth quickly pulling out his own in response; he wasn't vampire-fast any more, but he could still do this if he had to.

"No," the agent said firmly. "He's got a gun, Bones; I need you to leave now."

"Don't worry," Cutler said, raising the gun to his head as he spoke. "It's not you I intend to shoot…"

"There's no way Cutter Cutler kills himself," Booth said; no matter what this man had done, suicide wasn't an option for someone who'd made one bad call because he was angry at what had happened to his daughter. "No way Cutter Cutler goes down without a fight."

"What are you doing?" Bones asked. "Do you want him to shoot you?"

"Go," Booth said, his voice low, but his partner clearly understanding his suggestion as she hurried away.

"I was just like him, you know?" Cutler said, the gun staying close to his head as he spoke even if he wasn't pointing it at his head any more. "Under these same bleachers, in fact. I was as bad as him. You wouldn't understand."

"We were all like that," Booth noted; even if he hadn't been an actual jock, he'd done the equivalent when he was Liam and human all those years ago, and he knew enough from Cordelia's stories to know that some things hadn't changed (Xander had been limited by a lack of opportunity rather than a lack of interest).

"It changes your life view," Cutler continued. "You see your little girl… it's a different perspective."

Booth could certainly sympathise with that; even if he hadn't had Connor and Parker as children of his own, getting his soul back had certainly flipped his perspective on his past actions.

"People are gonna understand the action that you took, OK?" he said, trying to draw on his artificial memories of college statistics to reinforce this man's memories of his past. "I do. Man, you're Cutter Cutler. Lowest assist and turnover ratios. Twelve triple doubles in your last season. Nobody could change direction in the open court like you, man, nobody... no, do it now. Change direction again."

"Cutter Cutler died a long time ago," Cutler said, tearfully holding the gun to his chest as he made his last statement. "I'm just putting him away."

Booth raised his gun as Cutler moved his own weapon to his head, but the agent was saved from attempting a difficult shot as Bones moved up behind Cutler, slipping her hand between the hammer and the firing-pin before they could connect, pinching the skin but preventing the gun from firing.

His partner's hand would be sore for a while, but as she took the gun away from the now-sobbing Cutler, Booth was certain that she'd consider that a fair exchange…

* * *

  
"Your hand hurt?" Booth asked, indicating his partner's injury as they sat in their usual table at the Royal Diner, Cutler in lock-up and all evidence logged.

"A little," Bones admitted.

"So," he continued, as he pulled out his wallet to count out the change for their meal, "jock mentality… teams… not all bad, huh?"

"Why are you telling me this?" Bones asked.

"You just said we're all stunted adolescents who take children's games too seriously."

"I never meant you," Bones protested.

"Bones…" Booth said, appreciating her defence but knowing he wasn't worthy of it.

"What?"

"Bones," Booth said, deciding to cut to the chase before this became awkward. "I'm one of those guys."

"No you aren't," Bones corrected him. "You don't play at being a warrior; you are a warrior. Every day. You're definitely… a fully developed man."

"OK, OK," Booth said, touched at his partner's statement but not wanting to draw out the issue as he put down the money for their food; it was nice to be recognised as a warrior even when he was only human, but he didn't want to risk getting big-headed about it. "You leave the tip."

"Even Cutler knew you were lying when you said you treated women like that beneath the bleachers," Bones said, as she pulled out her own wallet.

"Oh, and you believe him?" Booth asked (He might not have treated anyone like that behind the bleachers, but that was only because Liam hadn't been alive at a time when people used bleachers).

"Yes," Bones said. "Because you still remember that first girl's name."

Booth felt suddenly ashamed at the false impression he was giving his partner. He appreciated her view of him as _Booth_ , but there was so much of his past as Liam, Angelus and Angel that countered that view; even if it was only because it had been so long since he'd actually done it, he _couldn't_ remember the first girl he'd done… _that_ … with…


	56. The Baby in the Bough

As cases went, Booth wasn't sure if this one would qualify as strange or amusing; getting stuck with having to keep an eye on a baby because of a complication in the chain of custody rule was slightly amusing, particularly seeing his partner try to cope with her awkward maternal instincts as she kept an eye on the child while he drove them to the trailer park that had been identified as the mother's home.

"OK," Bones began as the car came to a stop near the relevant trailer.

"No," Booth said firmly as he got out of the car. "No no no no no no no no."

"What?" Bones asked.

"No no no no," Booth finished; in this situation, he couldn't make his disapproval of what his partner had been about to do clear enough, as far as he was concerned. "Look, the front door is open; you stay here."

"But-" Bones began.

"Bones, there is a baby involved," Booth said, turning to look firmly at his partner. "If you hear gunfire, anything like that, drive away."

"But I'm not leaving you-" Bones protested.

"Yes, you will, because this is about the baby, not me," Booth said. "Promise me."

"I promise," Bones said after a moment's pause as she looked back at the baby before staring solemnly at him.

Satisfied with that response, Booth drew his gun and headed for the open trailer, cautiously entering to see a man in a leather jacket with wild hair ransacking the place, evidently looking for something.

"OK," Booth said, aiming his weapon as the man stepped out from a cupboard. "Easy; both hands to the ceiling, nice and easy… right there…"

The man tried to make a break for it, but Booth was easily able to deal with that, quickly grabbing and handcuffing the man in virtually the same motion; he might not be as fast as he once was, but it was hardly a challenge to capture a man in this kind of confined situation..

"You know, I asked you nicely," he said, looking firmly at the man. "Now then, as an FBI agent, I'm going to make this simple; who are you and what are you doing here?"

"I'm Lou Taylor," the man said.

"Really?" Booth said, looking the man over; he certainly struck Booth as the kind of guy who'd do something stupid like break into his own house, but he couldn't exactly be sure of anything and had no desire to take chances when a baby was involved. "Y'know, I'm not sure I buy that; who are you really?"

"I told you, I'm Meg's husband!" the man protested, his manner whoozy in a manner that could indicate drugs or simply general stupidity. "I live here!"

"If you live here, why'd you break the front lock?" Booth asked, indicating the door.

"I didn't do it!" Lou protested as Booth pulled him back upright. "Somebody else broke in. And when I saw it I thought I'd come in and check on Meg."

"Oh, so you live here or came by to check on Meg?" Booth asked. "Which one is it?"

"…All right, now you're getting me all confused," Lou said.

"Yeah, I bet," Booth noted.

"Look, Meg bails me out sometimes… If she can," Lou explained defensively. "And when I saw she wasn't here, I just figured I'd, you know, help myself."

"How often do you steal from your wife?" Booth asked.

"It's not stealing," Lou protested. "She likes to help me."

"Well, Meg's dead," Booth said; he might as well cut to the chase right now. "She was killed."

"How?" Lou said.

"You seem shocked," Booth noted.

"Well, of course I am!" Lou protested.

"Where were you last night?" Booth asked.

"Last night?" Lou said, looking at Booth in a daze, prompting the agent to clap his hands in the other man's face. "I don't remember."

As frustrating as it was, Booth had to confess that he didn't think the other man was lying; anyone who had committed a murder would come up with a better alibi than an inability to recall anything, and this guy struck him as the type of person who could barely keep track of his own life at the best of times. Deciding that it wasn't worth continuing to question this man, Booth simply made sure that the handcuffs were secure and led him out of the trailer.

"Hey Bones," he said, as he approached the car where his partner was now sitting in the back. "Her husband, real genius, doesn't even remember where he was last night."

"We've got your son in here," Bones said as she got out of the car. "His mother's dead and now you're the only one-"

"Oh, no no no no no," Lou said. "I never wanted to have a kid. She did it because she thought it would, uh, straighten me out, but I told her I couldn't handle a kid because I'm a free spirit…"

"What you are is a drunk, Lou," Booth said scathingly; there were times when he thought back to that mess with Axtius and wondered what it said about the world, where this guy and Axtius could have children and people like Elijah, Giles or Wesley could never get around to making time to have their own families…

"All right," he said, pulling out his radio as he turned his attention to more immediate matters. "Dispatch; I need a forensics team and a car for a burglary suspect and a possible murderer-"

"Woah!" Lou protested. "I didn't kill her! Why would I? She took care of me."

Booth was already convinced that the man wasn't the murderer he was looking for right now, but after everything he'd seen of this guy's life, combined with his casual approach to the fatherhood that he'd once believed he could never have, he thought it only right to make him sweat a little…

* * *

  
"I'm serious, Bones," Booth said as he changed Andy's diaper while his partner examined the key- this was one part of being a father that he was almost glad to have missed with Connor, even if he sometimes wondered how Holtz had managed in Quor'toth- "next time you're changing the diaper."

"Fine," Bones said, before turning her attention to Angela over the webcam as she used some kind of disinfectant to clean the last of the waste matter off the key. "There's a series of numbers on it."

" _These keys were coded to indicate a specific bank so read me your numbers_ ," the artist replied at the other end.

"36 09 20 14."

" _OK, searching_ …" Angela said, waiting for a moment before replying. " _Got it._ _It's from Green Hills Bank in Petersberg, West Virginia. I'll send the directions to your phone_."

"Thank you," Bones said.

" _No problem_ ," Angela said. " _How's my little bruiser_?"

"Well," Bones said, glancing back as Booth lifted Andy from the car, "he looks pleased that a piece of metal is no longer passing through his intestinal tract."

Smiling at that comment, Booth sang a little song for Andy, but was cut short when Bones frowned as she looked at the infant. "His legs are bowed."

"All babies' legs are bowed," Booth pointed out.

"No, not like this; how could I have missed that?" Bones said, turning back to the camera. "Tell Zack to run a P ratio test on the victim's teeth. He'll know what I mean."

" _Sure thing_ ," Angela said. " _Take care of him, sweetie_."

"I will," Bones said, disconnecting the webcam and turning back to Booth after checking her phone. "I've got the bank's address. It's in Petersberg, one town from Huntsville."

"Great!" Booth said. "I'll request a warrant. That'll give us time to go to Family Services in Parsons to-"

"What?" Bones said. "No! Not yet."

"Bones," Booth said- as much as he appreciated his partner showing her humanity, this was hardly the time for it- "I know this is difficult but we both agreed that we'd keep Andy to get the key. Now that we have the key…"

"No," the anthropologist said firmly. "You can't leave him with Family Services in the middle of nowhere. Cam still needs to review his medical records."

"Oh, well…" Booth said uncertainly. "I mean… Bones, there are doctors there…"

"You have no idea what that place will be like, Booth," Bones protested as she put Andy back in the car. "Med students, underfunded, understaffed -"

"Bones," Booth said, trying to get his partner to stop panicking.

"His mother is dead and his father is a felon," Bones said firmly. "I've been in his situation, Booth. I am not turning him over until I'm satisfied that he is somewhere safe where he'll get the care he deserves."

"Fine," Booth said, resigned to the current situation. "He can stay with us, for now."

He might have conceded to that request with some reluctance, but as Bones began to play with the baby after she put him back in the car, Booth had to admit that it was kind of sweet seeing her acting so casually around a child compared to her earlier manner; she'd been so _clinical_ when discussing her responsibilities as a foster parent earlier…

* * *

  
He'd always thought that nothing could be more brutal than what some demons did to the bodies of their victims, but ever since he'd started working with Bones on a regular basis, he'd been proven wrong about that more than once.

Staring at the bags of mulch lying around the Fallbrook Rubber warehouse, as Bones tested the bags' various contents to determine if any of them contained human remains, Booth knew that this went far beyond most demons he'd encountered; they might eat humans, but they didn't grind them down like _that_ …

"The rubber pieces float, see," Bones said, as she held up the latest jar before placing it on top of a nearby bin. "But bone…"

"Sinks," Booth finished, turning to look at Terry. "You just found Dave; tell the manager to shut this plant down now."

"Brennan," Bones said, answering her phone and waiting for a moment to listen to the other end. "Is Andy all right?"

Booth didn't have the chance to ask his partner what the rest of the staff had to say about Andy before she'd pulled out her laptop from his car, opening it to reveal a stream of numbers as Bones shifted the conversation to the webcam.

" _I recovered most of the memory from that flash drive_ ," the artist explained, as a spreadsheet appeared beside her image. " _Dave Shepard's internal audit? Showed a completely different set of numbers to those reported to corporate headquarters_."

"Somebody was doctoring the profit reports," Booth guessed.

"Siphoning money into a private account," Bones finished. "Dave figured it out while he was in Huntsville, that's what got him killed."

"And if Meg knew about it than the killer would want her dead too," Booth finished. "Come on."

Turning around to head back into the factory, Booth quickly hurried towards Rich and Terry; if there was fraud taking place in the factory, they had to identify the perpetrator as soon as possible. "Hey, where's Barnett?"

"Chip left," Rich said.

"Where'd he go?" Booth asked.

"Said he had an emergency at home," Rich said.

Booth didn't need his long experience with criminals to know that Chip's reaction was suspicious; he'd known what they were doing, so even if he couldn't be certain that they'd find anything of Dave's remains, he probably wouldn't want to take chances.

Pausing only to let Bones grab the jar, he got back into the car and hurried off after getting Chip's home address from the rest of the factory staff, the route there proving to be little real challenge as he arrived just in time to intercept Chip's red car driving away. Impulsively, Chip shifted into reverse to try and escape, but that pathetic attempt as escape ended when the car hit a fence, forcing Chip to get out and run. Leaping out of the car, Booth hurried after Chip, Bones just behind him, grabbing the man as he found himself stopped by another chain-link fence a short distance away.

"Chip Barnett," Booth said, as he handcuffed Chip's hands, "you're under arrest for eluding a federal agent. I'm sure we'll be throwing in a few murder charges as well. You know your rights, yeah?"

"Yeah," Chip said, looking scathingly at them. "It was only a matter of time before they closed the plant."

"So you embezzled from the company," Booth said.

"A man does what he has to for his family," Chip said firmly.

"So that justifies killing two innocent people?" Bones asked.

"Shepard was gonna turn me in," Chip said.

"So you _shot_ him," Booth finished. "Meg witnessed it, got a hold of the gun-"

"She wanted money to keep quiet, take her kid to some doctor in D.C.," Chip said.

"So you knew where she was headed," Bones concluded.

"Yeah, you followed her out of town so you could kill her with no-one around," Booth said grimly; with the amount of money he'd been embezzling, Chip could have paid Meg off and still had more than enough of a nest egg for himself, but he'd been too greedy to settle for anything less than the full amount.

"I didn't want to kill her," Chip said. "I went to her trailer, I looked for the gun first, but you do what you have to-"

"There was a baby in that car, you son of a bitch," Bones said, walking off in disgust as Booth hauled Chip along, taking care to watch just what he did to their latest killer.

He might have to beware of anyone trying to claim 'police brutality', but that didn't mean he had to treat everyone he arrested with kid gloves, and a man who considered killing a mother and her baby 'what he had to do' when there had been less violent options available deserved as little consideration as possible.

* * *

  
"You know," Booth said, as he and Bones sat in the trunk of his car drinking coffee, reflecting on how they had handed Andy over to Meg's friends with the case concluded, "I'm gonna miss that little guy...And so are you, so don't deny it."

"I'm not ashamed to say that I have developed a certain...affection for Andy," Bones admitted. "It's a natural byproduct of caregiving."

"Yeah," Booth said, smiling slightly at his partner's response; it might have been short-term, but he knew from watching Cordelia and Fred with Connor that babies had a habit of winning over any woman if they spent enough time together. "So, what do you think, huh? Change your mind about having kids?"

"Booth!" his partner said.

"OK, all right!" Booth said defensively, before he smiled teasingly at her. "You got some time… not _that_ much time-"

"Booth!" Bones said, swatting at him and knocking his coffee out of his hand.

"Hey!" Booth protested.

"Now look what you did!" Bones said, wiping down some documents that had been hit by the spilt coffee.

"What _I_ did?" Booth said indignantly. "You're the one who hit me!"

Before Bones could say any more, he took the documents from her, glancing over them in confusion; his partner might be smart, but this looked like it was based more on engineering work than anything she'd usually study. "Whoa, what is all this stuff?"

"It's information Carol gave me, from a structural engineer," Bones said.

"Oh, so you took my financial advice, did you?" Booth asked. "You're gonna build that home?"

"No," Bones corrected him. "The congressman couldn't help so I'm rebuilding the bridge into Huntsville. I've hired Carol Grant as the project manager."

"Wow," Booth said, impressed at the scope of the proposed operation. "That is going to cost a fortune."

"Well, to you it's a fortune," Bones said. "But with my advance, and selling the movie rights-"

"Yeah, I get it," Booth said, smiling at the anthropologist. "You know, I thought you said that towns lived and died liked organisms, that sometimes we should just let them go?"

"Sometimes it takes one thing, like a bridge, for a town to start recovering," Bones said. "Back on the scenic route the gas stations could reopen, restaurants, maybe a bed and breakfast for people wanting to stay in the area."

"Wow, listen to you; good for you," Booth said, handing the documents back; he might not always save the world as Seeley Booth, but he'd never have been able to do something like this as Angel. "You know, it's a, it's a shame."

"What?" Bones asked.

"No kids," Booth said. "Who's going to be proud of you?"

"I don't do it for that," Bones said.

"Yeah, OK, I know. I know," Booth said, sitting in silence for a moment before he decided to lighten the mood. "You know, with next year's book, you should uh, you should get that second home in that town you saved. I mean, it only makes sense, right? Because every year, plasmas, they go down, they get cheaper and cheaper; it happens all the time."

"Forget it," Bones said.

"What?" Booth protested. "I'm just saying. Andy's going to miss his Auntie Bones. He's going to want to see you. We could all go fishing, come back home, plop ourselves in front of that one hundred and three inch plasma screen of _heaven_ and _football_ and you can make the _five layer_ dip."

"Seven layer dip," Bones corrected.

"Even better!" Booth smiled. "Seven layers! Perfect! You can talk to Andy: hello Andy, little baby, little baby baby Andy-"

Getting a pacifier shoved in his mouth at that point might have been humiliating if they'd been in public, but considering that it was just the two of them at the time, Booth felt comfortable jokingly sucking on it as he looked at his partner, smiling around the reminder of their brief time as 'parents' to the child.

It had been a while since Connor, and he hadn't really had a chance to spend much time with Parker, but it had been strangely nice to act as a 'parent' to an infant once again…


	57. The Verdict in the Story

"Bones," Booth said, smiling in satisfaction as he led her through the construction site where their latest case had been discovered, "you are not going to believe this one."

"Well, you said that about the guy who was stuffed inside a huge truck tire," Bones noted. "I believed that."

"Yeah, that was a good one," Booth acknowledged. "This is a whole new level of weird."

As he fully opened the makeshift gate leading to the victim, he was pleased to see that his partner looked just as bemused as he'd imagined she would be; the skeleton's hands and feet were tied together behind its back as it rested on a pile of bricks, the whole body in a circular shape with no trace of flesh on it whatsoever.

"Whoa," Bones said. "I don't believe it."

"What did I tell ya?" Booth noted.

"How could this happen?"

"Maybe he was rolled up in a carpet?" Booth suggested, already knowing that the scenario was unlikely but unable to resist the temptation to lighten the mood.

"Where's the carpet?" Bones asked, laughing at the sheer absurdity of the idea.

"Well, it rotted away," Booth said. "You know, with the meaty parts."

He was slightly offended when his partner started laughing at that statement. "What? It's possible."

"That… that would've, that would've taken thousands of years," Bones said, cracking up as she spoke while examining the body. "The bones should be in a pile but… something is holding them together and-"

"What is with you?" Booth asked, amazed at the idea that his weak joke had made her laugh this much.

"Rolled up in a carpet?" Bones continued. "'Meaty parts'?"

"Excuse me?" Caroline asked as she walked into the area wearing a hard hat, looking critically at the still-laughing Bones. "What is so funny?"

"Nothing," Bones said, trying to stop her laughter.

"I should hope not because there's a dead body deserving of respect right in front of you," Caroline said. "What happened to him?"

As Bones continued laughing, Caroline looked grimly over at Booth. "I did not know she could laugh."

"What are you doing at the crime scene?" Booth asked, wanting to focus on the more obvious priority.

"Doctor Brennan is suspended from all crime-related duties," Caroline said.

"What?" Booth said.

"What?" Bones repeated, her amusement at an end. "For laughing at Booth?"

"That really doesn't bother me," Booth said.

"We have a date for your father's murder trial," Caroline explained. "Booth is the arresting officer. You can't work together until it's over."

"This is not necessary," Bones protested.

"They don't need to separate us," Booth interjected; he and Bones had been working together for months with no problems despite Sweets' perception of their relationship, and he doubted that any would arise now.

"I'm very compartmentalised."

" _Very_ compartmentalised."

"Take it up with the FBI, Cherie," Caroline said, before she turned to leave the site.

"Well, that sucks," Booth said, lost for anything better to say.

"This one looked really interesting," Bones noted, studying the skeleton uncertainly.

"Yeah," Booth said. "Really, really interesting… well, I'll let you know what happens."

"You're not going to solve it without me," Bones noted, the two staring at the skeleton out of a lack of anything else to do.

Booth had to admit, the lack of a forensic anthropologist would definitely make this case harder.

Then again, considering the obvious anomalies in the state of the corpse, he may want to consider checking in with some of his more obscure contacts from his time as Angel to make sure this was something Seeley Booth could solve; the list of people with the power and desire to do something like this couldn't be that long…

* * *

  
"I'm gonna say to you what I always say to you before a trial because this one is no different than any other trial," Caroline said, looking at the team as they sat around the conference room.

"You've never said that before," Zack noted.

"What?" Caroline said.

"You've never told us that a trial is no different from any other trial," Hodgins clarified with a slight smile.

"Which suggests that this one is different," Zack elaborated.

"Have you no control over these people?" Caroline asked.

"None whatsoever," Cam admitted.

"Look, Caroline, it's Bones," Booth said as he leant over the table. "It's different; let's just admit that."

Privately, he was just relieved that this wasn't the same as the last 'different' situation he'd faced with his team; they might be technically working against Bones now, but at least they knew they'd get her back at the end…

"Here's what's not different," Caroline said, looking firmly at the team. "Lose the 'Cocky' belt buckle; no badges saying 'Resist Authority' or 'The Truth is Out There'; do not cut your own hair the day before a trial; ugly up a little, the plain women on the jury hate you; use your fully grown-up words; eat; last time, your stomach was growling louder than your testimony."

"Then don't put me on first thing in the morning," Cam pointed out.

"I assure you I will be totally, awesomely mature on the stand," Sweets added.

"Ms. Julian, I'm not taking the stand," Angela noted.

"You have to," Cam said, as Booth looked at the artist in surprise.

"Look," Angela said, "I'm not gonna tell anybody else what to do here but I'm not testifying."

As the forensic artist left the room, Booth wished that he could get out of this situation himself; he had too many official obligations to just duck out himself, but he _really_ wished he didn't have to do this…

"Booth?" Caroline asked, cutting off his reflection.

"Right," Booth said, walking forward to address his team. "OK, listen up, people. Bones, she believes in the system. She finds out that Angela is not going to testify, she's not going to like it, OK? She'd want all of us to do our jobs."

"Doctor Brennan does seem to have an enviable, if somewhat disturbing, ability to compartmentalize," Sweets noted, before looking at Caroline. "Hey, how- how's that for fully grown-up vocab?"

"Clean and detached, people," Cam addressed the table. "Just the way Doctor Brennan likes it."

"I have no problem," Zack said.

"I'll ask Doctor Brennan directly," Hodgins said. "If she says okay, then I'm onboard."

"See you all in court," Caroline said, as the team got up to leave the room.

Booth knew he was repeating himself, but he strongly wished that he didn't have to be in this kind of position; one thing about being Angel was that it was a lot easier to lose the right battles without risking losing his job…

* * *

  
"I obtained my undergraduate psych degree from the University of Toronto, Masters Degree in Abnormal Psychology from Temple University and my Doctorates in Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Analysis at Columbia University," Sweets said, as the psychologist began his testimony by listing his qualifications.

"Doctorates?" Booth said to Bones in surprise, leaning over the corridor to whisper to his partner; he'd known that Sweets was good, but he hadn't expected the guy to be _that_ good. "As in more than one?"

"I won simultaneous Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships to write my book, 'The Art of Evolutional Profiling'…" Sweets continued.

"More than one scholarship too," Bones added.

"Which is what brought me to my current posting at the FBI," Sweets added.

"No wonder Doctor Geeks can never hang on to a girlfriend," Booth noted grimly; he didn't mean to sound like a high school jock, but there was no way that Sweets could be that busy _and_ maintain an active dating life.

"There I do partners therapy and psychological profiling," the doctor concluded.

"It's Dr. Sweets," Bones put in.

"I know, Bones," Booth said, glad to receive this further evidence that his partner was still herself. "I was just saying Doctor Geeks, as in geeks."

"Do you require a list of my scholarly publications?" Sweets said.

"The defence stipulates that Dr. Sweets is a qualified expert witness, despite the fact that he looks like a high school volleyball player," the defence lawyer, David Barron, cut in before Sweets could say anything else.

"Meet Doctor Geeks," Booth concluded.

"Excuse me, Agent Booth?" the judge said firmly. "I would like you to switch seats with Doctor Saroyan. You, Doctor Brennan, please switch seats with your brother."

"Why?" Bones asked.

"You don't whisper as quietly as you think you do," the judge said grimly.

"Yeah," Booth whispered to his partner. "You know, you do whisper a little loud."

"You started it," Bones noted as they got up.

"Just a little bit," Booth said as he obeyed the order. "Little loud."

Once the two had made the necessary relocation, the judge indicated to Caroline that she could continue her questioning.

"Doctor Sweets," Caroline said as she stood in front of the stand, "did you compile a psychological profile of the defendant?"

"Yes," Sweets said. "Over a series of meeting spanning over six months."

"Is he capable of murder?" Caroline asked.

"Like, totally," Sweets said, before realising his poor word choice. "Most definitely. Um, in his own way, Max Keenan is a very impressive man."

"What do you mean, 'in his own way'?" Caroline asked.

"Well, Max Keenan doesn't adhere to an external ethical system," Sweets clarified.

"He does what he wants," Caroline assessed.

"No," Sweets corrected her. "He does what he thinks is right, whether or not the rest of the world agrees. In another time, he could have been a great leader."

Maybe it was slightly egotistical of him to think of his time as Angel as a good example of that, but Booth liked to think that he'd proven that kind of statement true; he'd always tried to do what he thought was best, and his team and friends had mostly respected him for it (Even if it had also meant acknowledging when he did the wrong thing as well)…

"You mean in a time when people conked each other on the head and lit them on fire as a way of getting what they want?" Caroline said, reminding Booth that he no longer lived in a world where cutting off your opponent's head to stop it eating people was a believable situation or an acceptable resolution.

"Yes," Sweets acknowledged.

"Is Max Keenan dangerous?" the lawyer continued.

"When he feels his loved ones are threatened?" Sweets responded. "Mega dangerous."

"In your opinion, if Max Keenan felt that he was threatened or his family was threatened, could he do this?"

"Totally," Sweets said, glancing at the picture of the victim on the screen before registering Caroline's critical stare. "I mean, indubitably."

"Without hesitation?"

"Without hesitation, without remorse, without guilt," Sweets confirmed.

As Caroline turned to look at the jury, Booth wondered what it said about his life that he could look back and both regret and long for the days when he had been the kind of person that Sweets had just described.

He didn't entirely agree with Sweets' final assessment- people like him and Max could feel guilty if they had to kill people who were threats for reasons outside their control; he still felt guilty about Holtz's death even if the guy had basically committed suicide- but trying not to go that far at least made it easier for him to connect to people these days if they thought his days of killing were completely in the past…

* * *

  
"Bones," Booth said, as he solemnly walked into his partner's apartment with Zach behind him, "I have a warrant here to search these premises for any weapon or implement congruent with the murder weapon."

"I could save you some time," Bones began.

"No," Booth interjected; he found Bones's assistant weird, but right now he had to go by the rules and let Zack take point if this case was going to get anywhere. "Zack, is ,uh, gonna be the bone expert on this one; he'll be doing all the looking."

"Where did Clark Edison learn that trick with the food dye?" Zack asked his teacher. "I don't know that trick."

"Zack," Booth said, clicking his fingers impatiently. "Focus, OK?"

As Zack began his search, Booth looked awkwardly at his partner as she sat down on a nearby chair; no matter how this search turned out, Bones had been through an emotional roller-coaster in court today, and he wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to be there for her. "How ya doing there, Bones?"

"When it looked like my father might go free I got…" Bones began, shaking her head in confusion. "This is very confusing for me."

"You liked the idea of him beating the murder charge," Booth noted.

"Yes," Bones admitted. "But he did it. We both know my father did it."

"Bones," Booth assured her as he sat down opposite her, "wanting your father to come home instead of going to prison, that's- that's OK."

"But what I do…" Bones began. "What we do is put murderers like him away."

Booth knew that he had to be careful about this; while part of him wanted to defend Max because he recognised that he had done the same thing and worse as Angel, the rest of him knew that he had to act as Booth and treat this as a man who had to officially disapprove of Max Keenan's actions…

"OK," he said. "You're not Doctor Brennan today; you're Temperance."

"I don't know what that means."

"The scientist part of you got sidelined, temporarily," Booth clarified.

"I still don't know what that means-"

"Bones, just… take the brain, OK, put it in neutral, alright?" Bones said, imitating a car engine revving as he leant back on the chair; she still might not get the joke, but it helped him feel like he was making his point. "Take the heart- pop it into overdrive."

"Sometimes I think you're from another planet," Bones said, prompting Booth to sit back up as he looked at her. "And sometimes I think you're really very nice."

The moment was subsequently interrupted when Zack returned with a possible murder weapon, but Booth appreciated that he'd had the chance to have that last exchange with his partner on this topic before things became really awkward.

* * *

  
"Doctor Hodgins has confirmed that particulates were found placing the accused at the scene of the murder, the seminary, and the rooftop where the victim was immolated," Barron said, as the trial continued, the murder weapon identified as a small antique dagger in her apartment.

"Yes," Booth confirmed.

"Was anyone else present at all three locations?" Barron asked.

"Me," Booth acknowledged. "But I didn't kill the deputy director of the FBI."

"You had motive," Barron noted. "He fired you that day and threatened Ms. Julian. By the way, was she at all three locations?"

"Objection!" Caroline protested. "It's just rude to accuse me of murder."

"I count three people in this courtroom, besides my client, who had motive to kill Kirby," the lawyer continued, ignoring Caroline's statement as he looked at the judge.

"I'll allow it," the older man conceded.

"Ms. Julian was never at the crime scene, so you're stuck with me," Booth said. Barron was a strange method of clearing someone of murder, but he had to admit that it made sense; with Max the only viable suspect right now, introducing another possibility could raise enough doubt to get Max out of the murder charge…

"And Doctor Brennan," the lawyer put in after a moment's thought.

"I see where you're going with this," Booth said, resisting the urge to glare; that kind of approach might defend his partner's reputation, but it wouldn't help him make his point right now.

"Was Doctor Temperance Brennan at the seminary?" Barron continued.

"Yes," Booth said; so long as he didn't lie now, he may be able to say his piece later…

"And her apartment that same day?"

"Yes."

"She has already identified this knife as hers, she is as viable a suspect as Mr Keenan," Barron continued, holding up the knife in question. "Doctor Sweets has confirmed that Doctor Brennan is highly rational and capable of rationalizing almost any action if required; what we need to know now is if she had a motive."

"Yes, she had motive," Booth acknowledged, suddenly hating the thought that he'd ever approved of this avenue of inquiry; 'accusing' him was one thing, but accusing Bones was quite another. "Kirby tried to kill her brother."

"Thank you," Barron said with a satisfied smile.

"Bones was with me all day," he interjected

"She didn't have time to commit this murder?" Barron asked.

"No, she did not," Booth said firmly.

"How did your son, Parker, get home from school that day?"

"Forty-five minutes, we were apart, but we talked on the phone," Booth said, wondering how Barron had picked up that particular bit of information.

"Plenty of time, wasn't it Agent Booth?" Barron asked. "Doctor Brennan could have burned the body hours later when you were safe at home."

The worst part was that Booth had to admit that the timing did make a certain sense; if she was quick about it, knew where Kirby was, and knew where she was going to leave the body afterwards, Bones _could_ have done it…

 _No_.

She had the time, but she didn't have the personality; even if he'd had any doubt that Max had killed Kirby, the murder had been done too quickly and coldly for someone killing another human being up close for the first time.

There was being rational, and there was being ruthless; Doctor Temperance Brennan was _not_ that ruthless…

"The witness will answer the question," the judge said.

"That's a lot of heart, Bones," Booth noted quietly as he looked at his partner, hoping that she would understand his meaning; her response might suggest that she was willing to go along with this approach, but he wasn't.

"Your honour-" Barron began.

"Answer the question please, Agent Booth," the judge said.

"Could Bones have killed Kirby?" Booth said, trying to prepare himself for the consequences of what he was about to reveal. "Temperance Brennan… I've worked with this woman, I've stood over death with her, I've faced down death with her. And Sweets, he's brilliant, he is… but he's wrong. She could not have done this."

"I didn't ask you your opinion of Doctor Brennan's character," Barron said. "I asked you, did she have time?"

Looking at his partner, so desperate for a chance to re-forge a relationship with her father, there was nothing that Booth could say to that except the truth.

"Yes," he admitted grimly. "She had time."

It would get Max Keenan off the hook for murder, but Booth _really_ hated having to support even the implication that Bones could ever have been what he was once.

Doctor Temperance Brennan had dedicated her life to solving the mysteries left by death; she wasn't capable of causing death herself…


	58. The Wannabe in the Weeds

"Look," Booth said, indicating the people working out at the Valera Wellness Gym, "these people are just trying to get healthy, Bones; that's all."

"There is a fine line between 'healthy' and 'vanity'," Bones said, as Booth found himself studying one of the women working out on a nearby machine, her midriff bare and her legs and chest well-displayed as she stretched. "…obsession with physical perfection clouds a society's moral vision," Bones continued, before she reached over to strike him on the shoulder. "You are ogling that woman!"

"What?" Booth said. "No, I'm not; I'm just-"

"Yes you are!" Bones countered.

"I-I-I'm just… um… admiring her routine," Booth said awkwardly, saved from trying to further defend himself when a man came over.

"Hi, I'm the Wellness Centre's manager, Doctor Jason," the man said, smiling politely at them. "I understand you're with the FBI."

"I'm Special Agent Seeley Booth, this here's Doctor Temperance Brennan," Booth confirmed. "We're here about Thomas Sour."

"He in trouble?" Doctor Jason asked.

"He's dead," Booth stated.

"That explains why he's not returning my calls," Doctor Jason noted, his voice low and grim.

"You don't seem too upset about that," Booth noted.

"Tommy was my most popular trainer," Doctor Jason said defensively. "Since he disappeared, I've had to deal with a lot of angry clients. You're with the FBI; that mean Tommy was murdered?"

"Look, you wouldn't happen to know a woman, a client of his, Pam?" Booth asked, only to be met with a lack of recognition. "Some people refer to her as 'Fat Pam'?"

"I know who you mean," Doctor Jason, smiling in understanding. "Pam Nunan. She booked two-hour sessions; paid cash, perfect client, until…"

"Until?" Bones asked.

"Until she fell in love with Tommy," Doctor Jason said scathingly. "Started to freak him out."

"How so?" Bones asked.

"She was too handsy," the manager explained. "She'd rub up against him… even invited him on a Caribbean cruise."

"Would you happen to have Ms. Nunan's address?" Booth asked, privately noting that the situation at least sounded like a fairly tame stalker; offering unwanted gifts might be aggravating, but it wasn't explicitly dangerous.

"Sure," the other man said, heading off to his office as Booth found himself glancing over at the exercising woman again; he wasn't sure if it was just him being human again, the end of his curse, or the fact that he no longer had to keep as many secrets as he had before, but it was so much easier to appreciate attractive women as Booth than it had been as Angel…

* * *

  
Sitting opposite Pam Nunan after she came to his office, Booth wasn't sure if he should or shouldn't consider a suspect at this point; she was clearly disturbingly invested in her relationship with the deceased, but there was still no reason to think that she was an actual suspect at this point.

"He's such a cutie, isn't he?" Pam said she indicated the photo album filled with photos of the victim. "Tommy is such a wonderful person. Big heart, and so devoted."

"You brought a photo album?" Bones asked.

"You said you wanted to talk about Tommy," Pam clarified. "I figured you'd like to see pictures."

"Those pictures are…" Booth began, holding his hand out for the album to study it more closely before confirming his opinion. "They are taken from quite a distance, Pam."

"He's so shy," Pam said with a smile. "It's one of the things I love about him."

Pam was clearly deluded if she genuinely believed that she had been engaged to Tommy- nothing he'd seen so far suggested that their vic had seen her that way- but Booth wasn't interested in that angle right now; he just needed to establish if she was able to kill rather than anything else.

"We understand that Tommy was your personal trainer?" Bones asked.

"Oh, he was so much more than that," Pam clarified. "Before I met Tommy, I was so down on myself, but Tommy... he's such a sweetheart."

"Does Tommy share your affection?" Bones asked.

"Why do you ask it like that?" Pam asked, looking curiously at Booth. "Because I don't look like a scarecrow? Like her?"

"Hey!" Bones protested. "What - what are you coming after me for? D-do I look like a scarecrow?"

"Well, you…" Booth began, before he looked over at Pam; it was best not to do anything that might cost them a viable witness. "I think you look good."

"Thank you," Pam said, as Bones looked indignantly at him. "Like Tommy, you see me for who I really am. Not... scrawny."

"What- I am not scrawny," Bones protested as Pam glared at her. "My body mass index is well within the normal limits-"

"Can we talk about Tommy, please?" Booth asked, wanting to get the conversation back on topic.

"If he didn't love me, why would he want to marry me?" Pam pointed out.

"Marry you?" Booth repeated; her reaction to this news may help him determine the extent of this woman's delusions. "He was going to marry you?"

"Tommy's my life," Pam said, in the direct manner common to people determined to ignore reality. "And I'm his. Whatever you think he's done, I know he didn't do it."

"We're not worried about what he did," Bones corrected. "It's what you might have done."

"Tommy is dead," Booth clarified, as Pam looked sceptically at him.

* * *

  
"The pathology is clear," Sweets said, talking to Bones as he followed her into Booth's office, Booth currently on the phone double-checking Pam's alibi after her interview. "She's possessive and amoral."

Booth frantically gestured to Sweets to be quiet as he listened on the phone, which at least prompted the psychologist to be quieter as he continued speaking. "Her emotional connections are forged through manipulation and delusion. Once a connection that tenuous breaks-"

"So she killed Tommy Sour?" Bones asked.

"I can't say that, of course, but she is a dangerous person," Sweets noted.

"Thank you," Booth said, terminating the phone call so that he could focus his attention on the people in front of him. "Well, her story checks out; she was in Florida when he was killed. Her parents are devastated that their future son-in-law- who they never met- will no longer be her love-monkey."

"Well, Doctor Sweets still thinks that she's the killer," Bones noted.

"Dangerous," Sweet corrected. "I think she's dangerous."

"I agree," Booth said.

"Thank you, Agent Booth," Sweets said.

"All those gifts," Booth said, getting up from his desk as he looked at the younger man with a teasing grin, "and taking pictures from a distance, and showing up in the middle of the night in a nighty, it's all very 'dangerous'."

"Mocking will not change my opinion," Sweets said defensively. "I've been mocked many, many times before."

As Booth and Bones exchanged glances, Sweets clearly realised what he'd just said. "That… came out wrong."

"Yeah, that's great, Sweets," Booth said, pushing the other man towards the door. "Appreciate your help, but you what? She has an alibi. See ya?"

"Well… just be cautious, OK?" Sweets said, stopping the door before Booth could close it. "She's not stable."

"Great, thank you," Booth said, trying to close the door again.

"Oh, and remember," the doctor added, walking back into the office. "Our session on Tuesday's at four? Trust exercises? Be there?"

Booth could only roll his eyes as Sweets left, further exasperated by the reminder of their continued pointless appointments with that guy; was Sweets even _aware_ that half the time he was the one who made things into issues between him and Bones?

* * *

  
Listening to the man currently on stage as he sat in the Checkerbox, Booth wondered if he'd ever sounded that bad when he'd sung in Caritas; at least he'd actually had a _reason_ to get up on stage when he was that poor a singer…

"Finally," he said, looking over at his partner in relief as Bones finally arrived. "I mean, one more show tune and I was going to start shooting."

"He has excellent projection," Bones noted, indicating the current singer. "I heard him while I was parking."

"Yeah, OK, I talked to some of the patrons here," Booth said, deciding to cut to the chase and avoid discussing the music. "Open Mic Night is every Monday and Tuesday."

Noting some people trying to hush him, he had to chuckle. "Actually, some of these people think that this stuff is good."

"What's Open Mic Night?" Bones asked.

"It's, uh, you know, Cabaret meets Karaoke," Booth clarified. "Singers that want to get discovered."

"Will you please be quiet?" a woman sitting in front of him said, turning back to look at him.

"Based on the E. coli in Tommy's blood, he definitely was here shortly before he was killed," Bones continued.

"Pammy said he was musical," Booth noted.

"This guy is not bad," Bones said, smiling at the man currently singing on stage.

"You're kidding me!" Booth said, unable to believe his partner's lack of taste.

"No, I love his enthusiasm," Bones clarified.

"Dude, do I need to get the manager?" the man in front said, turning around once again.

"Dude, actually, you know what?" Booth said, pulling out his badge to show it to the other man. "That would be great; why don't you point him out to us?"

After a brief glare, the man pointed at another table, where a man was sitting and looking around the club, dressed in a dark jacket with a purple-trimmed shirt, looking uncomfortable as he studied his surroundings. As the current song came to an end, Booth ignored his partner's applause as the manager stepped onto the stage.

"Up next," the manager said, "the smooth and smoky, Chris Calabasa!"

"Excuse me," Booth said, leaning over to try and get the man's attention as he walked off-stage, the piano starting to play and the next singer moved forward. "Agent Booth, FBI-"

"Oh come on, I told you guys everything I know," the manager said in exasperation. "I bought the raw honey from a company out of Maryland, I gave the CDC guy the Bill of Sale and the remaining honey; what else you want from me?"

"No, we're not here about the E. coli," Bones corrected. "We need to speak with you about Tommy Sour."

"We believe he was murdered," Booth clarified.

"Murdered?" the other man repeated in shock.

"Were you friends?" Booth asked.

"Well, he-he was good for business," the man clarified, which was at least an honest opinion. "Talented. Showed up at every Open Mic Night since day one. When I didn't see him around I figured… he got a paying gig, you know?"

"Anything unusual about his final performance?" Booth asked; he knew from Lorne that managers could pick up a lot of details about singers.

"No," the other man said. "Everyone loved him, like always."

"Everybody thinks they're the next Kelly Clarkson," Booth noted, looking sceptically at the current singer.

"Yeah, you got that right," the manager said with a slight smile.

"Who's Kelly Clarkson?" Bones asked.

"American Idol," Booth clarified, continually amazed at how he knew more about modern culture than his partner even with his vampiric past as a 'handicap'. "'Because of You'."

"Because of me?" Bones repeated in confusion.

"Never mind," Booth said, deciding to avoid that question; any debates right now would be completely pointless. "Just… stay here, OK? Not up there. So, did he have any enemies?"

"Yeah," the manager acknowledged, indicating the current singer. "You're listening to him right now. There was a talent scout here that night. Tommy stole his song; Chris had to default to 'Piano Man'."

"Ooh, that hurts," Booth noted; he might not get this idea himself, but he'd picked up enough from Lorne over the years to know that 'Piano Man' wasn't the best song to show off your skills.

"When Chris finished singing, he pulled Tommy aside and they started shoving each other," the man continued. "I told them to take it outside. They disappeared into the parking lot."

"Then what?" Booth asked.

"I don't know," the manager said. "I never saw Tommy again."

Looking over to the stage as Chris finished his song, Booth knew that they had at least one other suspect to question now; killing someone because they were cheated out of a potential singing contract might be comparatively petty, but he'd encountered more pathetic motives as Angel and as Booth.

* * *

  
"I get it when a college kid wants to be a rock star, but half of those singers were over thirty!" Booth said incredulously as he sat with Bones at the diner. "Do they really think they're going to be famous?"

"The need to stand out from the crowd is innate," Bones noted.

"It's obnoxious!" Booth said dismissively; the idea that two people could get into a fight because of a fake agent just seemed ridiculous to him.

"You were the best sniper when you were in the army!" Bones pointed out.

"I was just doing my job, OK?" Booth protested. "Well."

He had spent decades being unique as a vampire with a soul, and he may have had a lot of memories of 'his' army career, but he'd never really _enjoyed_ the attention he received for what he was; when he had his soul intact, he'd just wanted to do what he was there to do and deal with the bad guys.

"And that set you apart from the others," Bones continued.

"Bones, we're talking about singing some nightmarish Broadway songs-"

"It doesn't matter," Bones corrected. "Whoever is best has the status and power... and becomes the superior mate."

"Yeah, well I tell you that some of those people are not going to be mating, that's for sure," Booth noted, shaking his head at the memory of some of the crap he'd seen.

"But they will have the power and prestige," Bones clarified. "You enjoy it because you are a superb agent."

"You think?" Booth asked, touched at that statement despite his best intentions.

"Yes, of course," Bones noted. "Since I am the best in my field, it would be self-destructive for me to work with someone who's beneath me."

"Oh," Booth said, deciding to take that as the weird compliment it was. "OK… Well, that's good. 'Cause, um, you know, I have to be honest here… Sometimes I think that you think you're better than me."

"Well, objectively, I am more intelligent…" Bones noted.

"There you go…" Booth said.

"In certain areas," Bones clarified. "And in others… I understand my limitations, and I... admire your expertise."

"Huh," Booth said, surprised at that news. "You admire me?"

"…In certain areas of expertise," Bones confirmed.

"Well, I admire your expertise," Booth said; if she was going to compliment him, he might as well return the favour. "You have a whole... science thing."

"Thank you," Bones said. "I'm an author too."

"I know," Booth noted.

"Best-selling, and that also gives me elevated status."

"Here comes the ego," Booth sighed.

"No, I'm not saying that society is _correct_ to elevate me; I'm not saying that I deserve the elevation; I'm just saying that… it occurs" Bones elaborated. "Society should elevate scholars and teachers, not actors and athletes."

"Yeah, what about cops?" Booth asked, as his phone began to ring.

"They're very important," Bones noted, as Booth answered his phone, the sound of Pam Nunan on the other end of the line dispelling Booth's good mood at the earlier discussion. Even if he didn't think she was the killer, she'd spent enough time around the victim that she might have _something_ worthwhile to tell him, but that didn't mean he was totally comfortable around her…

* * *

  
"I really appreciate you seeing me," Pam said, as Booth showed her into his office, trying not to think about how she'd arranged this meeting; getting his number by posing as his _mother_ was a very strange way to get a meeting…

"Well, it's my job," Booth said awkwardly.

"That's precious," Pam said, chuckling. "It's your job."

"You said you had information about the-" Booth began.

"Hockey fan!" Pam said, noting the picture behind his desk. "I have that same print at my office. And it's Pam. I have season tickets to the Capitals, we should go sometime."

"Ms Nunan, about the case-" Booth tried to interject, not wanting to get into that discussion now or ever; it was inappropriate to date a suspect even if she _wasn't_ coming on far too strongly for his taste.

"Seeley, please; Pam," Pam said, smiling at him in a manner that uncomfortably reminded him of Drusilla in her calmer moments. "I need to ask you something."

"OK, well, I usually ask the questions-" Booth began; the woman might be off, but he didn't want to provoke her into leaving in case she _did_ know something useful-

"Are you dating Doctor Brennan?"

"No!" Booth protested automatically, resorting to the default explanation. "She's my partner."

"I see," Pam said, glancing down at the photograph of Parker on his desk. "Your nephew?"

"It's my son," Booth clarified, moving to stand in front of the picture.

"You're married?" Pam said.

"I'm not," Booth clarified. "Listen, I'm-I'm kind of busy here, Ms Nunan…"

"I brought you something," Pam continued, handing him a small wrapped bag, which he opened to reveal a pair of green socks.

"OK…" he said, looking uncertainly at the gift.

"I know you've got a thing for socks," Pam explained.

"How did you, uh…?" Booth asked.

"I noticed them last time," Pam clarified. "On the outside, you're this big tough FBI guy... but really you're just like me. Unpredictable. Like Tommy was."

"Please…" Booth said, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this conversation;

"I know; we shouldn't talk about our old flames," Pam said, clearly missing the point. "Especially when we're just getting to know each other."

"Ms Nunan," Booth said, putting the socks down to try and get the conversation back on track, "you said you had information about Tommy Sour's murder?"

"Really?" Pam said, in a tone that made it impossible to be sure if she'd genuinely forgotten what she'd told him or was trying to just play it cool when confronted with evidence of her delusion. "I have faith you'll find out who killed him. And Tommy wouldn't want me to grieve forever."

Booth was trying to think of the most diplomatic way to respond to that statement- evidently this woman became fixated on things far more quickly than even Sweets had anticipated- before she began to study his wall. "Look at all these commendations... You're really great at your job, aren't you? It's one of the reasons I'm drawn to you."

"Ma'am," Booth said, stepping back as she picked up the dropped socks and moved closer to him, "this is _way_ inappropriate."

"Ma'am!" Pam said, laughing at that statement. "That is so cute! I can't wait to tell my mom you just said that. Well… Bye for now."

As the woman left, Booth made a mental note to take more care around that woman; she wasn't as dangerous as Drusilla, but she clearly wasn't entirely stable if she thought they had some kind of relationship after their brief meetings so far.

He briefly remembered that whole mess with David during his third year in Los Angeles, but quickly dismissed that analogy; David had been copying him for all the wrong reasons, but he'd still been doing something productive with his time, even if he had no real idea what he was doing.

* * *

  
Sitting in the Checker Box after the case had been resolved, the team gathered around various tables near the stage, Booth hoped that Bones appreciated their plans; it wasn't the usual pattern for closing a case, but considering how petty and simple it had turned out to be in the end, he felt that they all deserved a bit of fun.

"What's going on?" Bones asked as she entered the club. "Why did you call me here, Booth?"

"Your need to sing in front of a live audience," Booth said, standing up to indicate the rest of the team behind him. "It's innate, Bones."

"No way…" Bones said sceptically.

"Hey, I've got the music, the frivolity. What else do you need?" Booth asked, spreading his arms.

"Come on, Doctor Brennan, you can do it!" Hodgins called out, as the rest of the team clapped encouragingly at her. "We're here for you, we're here for you!"

"You're very controlled, Doctor Brennan," Sweets noted, leading her towards the stage as the piano began to play. "I think it would be a good idea for you to let yourself go."

"Really?" Bones said sceptically. "What about you?"

"Hey, I will be singing 'Lime in Da Coconut' after you," Sweets replied. "You will be extremely impressed. As was my Abnormal Psychology class in college. This opportunity is a gift from Agent Booth." The psychiatrist briefly put his hand on Booth's shoulder at that point, but a brief glare from Booth was enough to convince Sweets to remove it, even if he continued talking as though it had never happened. "Trust yourself, trust your friends; let 'er rip, let's hear it!"

As the gang cheered once again while Bones was led to the stage, Booth waited for the moment when his partner would back out of the offer, but instead, after a moment's thought, she dramatically threw her jacket aside, grabbed the microphone, and began to sing 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun'. Lost in the moment as he watched his partner enjoying herself and making a good impression- seriously, she was _really_ good at this- holding up an old lighter as he danced slightly in his seat.

For a moment, he almost felt like he was back in Caritas, in the better days before the club had been destroyed, surrounded by his friends in a place of sanctuary, not even aware of anything happening behind him until he heard someone call his name…

When he turned around to see Pam Nunan standing there, pointing a gun at his partner, he didn't even stop to think about it. Years of automatically putting himself in danger to protect his more vulnerable human friends took over as he stood up, the bullet striking him in the chest almost before he realised that he was doing it.

As he fell to the ground, Booth briefly registered the sound of further gunshots, but the fact that they were coming from behind him at least reassured him that Bones was doing the shooting rather than getting shot; if nothing else, he knew that he'd saved his partner. He saw her bending over above him, an urgent expression on her face as she yelled something about him being fine, but he just couldn't quite focus on her precise words; everything was going darker… becoming quieter… so like his first encounter with Darla so many centuries ago… so hard to focus…


	59. The Pain in the Heart

Standing at the side of the casket that was meant to be his, Booth had to wonder at this turn of events; he might not have actually _died_ this time, but this was still one more funeral than anyone should have, and that was without counting the time he'd gone to Hell and never had any kind of memorial…

"I knew Seeley Booth," Caroline said as she stood at beside the casket; the prosecutor might be an odd choice, but he supposed it made more sense than forcing Bones to tell that kind of lie. "He was a good man who earned my respect and affection, and I don't like many people. Booth had a selfless commitment to his work, first in the military and then the FBI. Two weeks ago, he made the ultimate sacrifice; giving his life to save his partner. And in the brave act, he showed us what greatness we are all capable of."

Glancing at the assembled attendees, Booth noted Bones saying something to Angela as she shifted uncomfortably, but he couldn't afford to pay too much attention to it; hearing Caroline give his eulogy was strange and awkward enough for him right now.

"May God's mercy and love shine on Seeley Booth as he takes his place beside the Lord," Caroline continued as she placed another rose on his coffin, prompting a comment from Bones that a merciful God would have saved Booth that he tried not to think about as he took up his position for the twenty-one gun salute.

If the guy he was looking for didn't show up soon, he was just going to try and steal someone's phone and find out why Bones hadn't bothered to call him yet…

When he saw his target walking towards the coffin, Booth made up his mind; dropping his gun, he charged towards the man and knocked him to the ground with a single powerful punch, the attempt quickly degenerating into a scuffle on the ground as his foe struggled to get away. Booth briefly registered something fall to the ground that had to be his 'coffin'- it was the only thing here large and solid enough to make that kind of noise- but that wasn't important right now; once this guy had been dealt with, Booth's faked death wouldn't be needed any longer…

A lucky shot gave the other guy the chance to get back to his feet, but before he could get away, Bones had grabbed the arm of the dummy that had been lying in the coffin and used it to knock the other guy down, before she turned to face him.

"Bones!" Booth said, grinning at the welcome sight of his partner. "Nice shot…"

His voice trailed off as he took in the look on the anthropologist's face, glaring at him in barely-contained anger before she punched him in the jaw.

Lying on the ground, Booth wondered how she should take this; clearly, she hadn't been informed about his death, but while he resented her hitting him that hard, it was kind of nice to have proof that she cared…

* * *

  
Sitting in his bathtub, sipping at a beer and smoking a rare cigar- after all the medical treatments he'd been through lately he felt that he could indulge as he celebrated his return to full health- Booth was only slightly surprised when Bones barged into the bathroom; Gormogon's new assault on the lab had interrupted their debate, but he knew Bones well enough to know that it wasn't over yet.

"I need to talk to you!" she said firmly.

"What the hell, Bones!" Booth said, as his partner walked over to turn off the record player. "I'm in my house, in my bathroom, in my bathtub! How the hell did ya get in here anyway?"

"Well, that fake rock by your front door wouldn't fool anybody," Bones said, before looking at his head incredulously. "Why are you wearing a hat that dispenses beer?"

"Hot tub, plus cold beer equals warm beer," Booth said awkwardly. "Hat? Equals solution. So why are you-?"

"And that cigar?" Bones continued. "Very unhealthy."

"OK, what the hell do you want now, Bones?" Booth asked, not wanting to get into discussions about his health right now. "OK? 'Cause I'm not really feeling too relaxed."

"You should have told me that you weren't dead," Bones said.

"I already explained this to you," Booth groaned; for a smart woman, Bones sometimes seemed to miss personal details if she didn't like them, and as a government employee he had to defend those decisions even if he agreed with her anger. "The bureau has to vet everyone when there is a security issue; I was just following protocol."

"Protocol?" Bones said indignantly.

"Yes!" Booth said, wishing she would get over it; it wasn't like _he'd_ made the choice himself.

"We've been partners for three years, Booth, and you've broken protocol before, sometimes putting my life in danger," Bones countered. "Which makes sense because you clearly don't have any real concern for me-!"

"I took a bullet for you!" Booth said, standing up before he could think about it.

"Once!" Bones countered. "That only goes so far… would you like a towel?"

"Fine," Booth said, quickly slipping back into the bath before this situation became more awkward. "What is it that I should have done, Bones? Wha- what did you want me to do?"

"Well, you could have called me," Bones elaborated. "Did you really think I needed to be vetted by your boss? I mean, don't you trust me?"

"Of course I do," Booth said (He ignored the part of himself asking why he hadn't told her about his real past; concealing something he wouldn't believe didn't mean he didn't trust her).

"Then why wasn't I told?" Bones asked. "It must have been something that you said."

"No," Booth said. "I don't know why you weren't told."

"But you said that I should be," Bones elaborated. "Aren't you curious why I wasn't?"

"Yes!" Booth said. "Do you want me to find out why you weren't told?"

"If it's important to you," Bones said, in the manner Booth had come to recognise as his partner's attempt to ask for help without admitting she needed it.

"Fine, I will," Booth , turning back to his comic book. "The next time I die, I promise that I will tell you."

"I'll look forward to that," Bones said.

"Me too," Booth said, lost for anything better to say as he settled back down into his bath, wanting to ignore his partner's pointed stares at the bathwater and his own frustrated confusion about how he should feel about the fact that nobody had told her he wasn't dead…

* * *

  
Walking up to Sweets as he spoke to someone on the phone outside Bones's office, Booth wondered if he should feel gratified or frustrated at the sound of Sweets already cancelling his patients. That could be either the guy aware that he was going to be in trouble or the guy assuming that they were going to need his insight, but Booth wasn't interested in the specifics right now; as he made Sweets end his call and take him into the office

"Tight grip you got there…" Sweets said.

"And it could get tighter," Booth said grimly. "So go ahead; tell her."

"Tell her what?" Sweets asked.

"Tell me what?" Bones asked.

"Tell her now," Booth clarified.

"What?" Sweets asked.

"Fine; I'll tell her, OK?" Booth said, looking between the two doctors. "I sent my list to the bureau. They sent it to Sweets. You were the one who decided not to tell Dr. Brennan that I was still alive. He's the one that you should have slugged, so do it. Go ahead and do it now."

"What?" Bones asked. "You chose not to tell me?"

"Yes, it's true," Sweets acknowledged. "Technically."

"Technically?" Booth repeated, unable to believe that defence.

"OK," Sweets said. "I reviewed the list and decided, knowing Doctor Brennan as I do, that she was in fact able to handle your death."

"Slug 'em," Booth said, unable to believe the doctor's justification.

"It was a National Security issue," Sweets insisted. "The fewer people that knew Agent Booth was alive, the safer he would be."

"I think that was a good choice," Bones said.

"Awesome," Sweets said.

"You do?!" Booth said, hurt at the assessment.

"Yes," Bones said. "You knew that Booth's death was something that I could deal with because I can compartmentalize."

"Woah, wait a minute," Booth protested. "Now why are you mad at me?"

"Because you should have told me personally," Bones said.

"Oh, I should have just ignored National Security concerns, broken the law and told you?" Booth asked, deciding not to bring up how he couldn't have known that she didn't know anyway; given her current mood, that probably wouldn't help him make his point.

"Yes," Bones said. "You know I'm very trustworthy."

"Yeah, but Sweets-" Booth protested.

"Sweets made a professional decision," Bones clarified. "He knew I could process your death and move on, which is precisely what I did."

"That's right," Sweets said.

"There's gotta be other stuff going on here, right?" Booth asked.

"What?" Sweets asked.

"Transference, paranoia… _come on_!" Booth protested. "I mean, when I offer her a piece of pie you say it has deeper meaning!"

"I don't like pie, Booth," Bones said.

"Well, apple pie," Booth clarified. "She doesn't like baked pie."

"I don't like my fruit cooked," Bones put in.

"OK, changing the subject is a way to avoid your feelings-" Sweets cut in.

"My feelings," Booth repeated. "OK, now you're attacking my feelings?"

In hindsight, it was probably for the best that Cam arrived at that point before he said anything he couldn't take back later; this whole mess was frustrating enough without him confessing to feelings that even he wasn't sure about.

* * *

  
"Hey," Booth said, walking into Bones's office after getting a quick update from Cam and Caroline. "I heard Zack was wrong about the dentures."

"No," Bones said.

"What do you mean?" Booth asked, wondering if Bones had changed her mind that quickly. "Cam and Caroline said-"

"He knew they weren't artificial," Bones clarified, as she brought up a model of the dentures on her computer. "Any first year student would know that. The dentures were made from real teeth; all canines."

"Woah," Booth said, morbidly impressed at the detail that must have been required to make those things.

"Canines are a symbol of the wolf which appears on the Gormogon tapestry in the vault," Bones explained, indicating a display of the tapestry on another screen. "And certain ancient sects revere the wolf as a symbol of freedom, as a representative of the forces that will deliver us from persecution."

"OK, Bones," Booth said, wondering if those religions had been inspired by the idea of the werewolves or if some of their numbers had actually been werewolves themselves; Oz and Nina hadn't seen their wolf that way, but he'd heard some stories from the Sunnydale gang about that 'Veruca' girl who'd indirectly driven Oz out of Sunnydale. "Enough about the wolf; what's going on?"

"Zack lied," Bones said.

"Why?" Booth asked.

"He…" Bones said, clearly finding this topic difficult. "He took the teeth from bone storage and he made Gormogon's dentures."

"Zack has complete access to the lab," Booth said, feeling the need to make some contribution to this discussion as he processed what she had said. "He arranged for the explosion himself."

"It's Zack," Bones said. "He's the killer, Booth. It's Zack."

* * *

  
Walking into the ICU room where Zack was being treated for his injuries to see Cam reading to Zack, the older woman laughing over Zack's ability to comprehend some of the scientific terms in the book in her hands, Booth almost hated to destroy this last moment of innocence.

It might not be the same as what he'd done to Drusilla- Gormogon was the one to 'ruin' Zack; Booth was just the guy with the unlucky role of exposing that corruption- but that didn't mean that this whole situation didn't piss him off…

"Cam," he said solemnly, not wanting to say it just yet. "I'm going to need the room."

Looking at him in shaken understanding, Cam got up and headed for the door, pausing to look directly at Booth and Bones.

"I'm sorry, but I have to ask," she began. "Are you absolutely certain, because-?"

Solemn nods from the two of them were all that Cam needed to learn the answer to her question.

"I did not see that coming," Cam said, sighing as she left the room.

"You looked at the mandible," Zack said, looking up from his bed as the two of them entered his room.

"You had to know I'd see it eventually," Bones noted.

"I didn't foresee the extent of my injuries," Zack said. "I was going to sneak out of here but-"

"Your friends never left your side," Bones noted.

"And you intended to steal the jaw bone and add it to the silver skeleton," Booth commented.

"But you designed the explosion," Bones said. "You must have known exactly how big it would be."

"Hodgins argued with me," Zack explained; in his favour, at least he looked awkward about this revelation. "He stood too close. The delay allowed the thermoplastic to reach the boiling point and as a result, the explosion was three times more powerful than I calculated."

"You must have known how badly you'd be injured," Bones said.

"Yes," Zack confirmed.

"Who's Gormogon, Zack?" Booth asked, after staring at the student in a probing manner.

"That's not what he's called," Zack said.

"Then what is he called?" Booth asked, walking grimly into the room; he'd intimidated Zack in the past without trying, so it shouldn't be that hard to do it on purpose.

"The Master," Zack said.

"And you're his apprentice?" Bones asked, which at least gave Booth a moment to collect himself after that statement; even knowing that Zack's Master couldn't be _the_ Master who'd turned Darla, the connotations weren't exactly pleasant…

"I need a name," he said, staring at the younger man.

"I can't tell you," Zack said, at least looking slightly intimidated. "The apprentice is expendable. I'm expendable."

"Who is he?" Booth said.

"Zack responds to logic, Booth," Bones said.

"Really?" Booth said indignantly. "'Cause I'd love to hear the logic of killing and eating people to change the world."

"The Master's logic is irrefutable," Zack said.

"Irrefutable?" Booth repeated incredulously; he'd barely agreed with the philosophy of eating people to save the world when Jasmine had put it into practise and he'd actually see the results, so he doubted that Gormogon would be able to come up with a better explanation when he was only human. "I saw him choking a child at the bottom of a pool!"

"If you knew what I know, you'd understand," Zack said. "You'd be proud of me."

"I've always been proud of you, Zack," Bones said, walking over to stand directly by his bed. "I've never met anyone more rational or intelligent. But there's a fault in your logic."

"With all due respect, you aren't cognizant of his logic," Zack said.

"Assumption #1: Secret societies exist," Bones said.

"Accepted," Zack confirmed. "Hodgins has been explaining this to me for years."

"Assumption #2: The human experience is adversely affected by secret societies."

"Accepted."

"Assumption #3: Attacking and killing members of secret societies will have an ameliorating effect on the human experience."

"Accepted."

"All of your assumptions are built upon a first principle, Zack," Bones concluded. "To wit: the historical human experience, as a whole, is more important than a single person's life."

"Yes," Zack stated.

"Yet you risked it all so you wouldn't hurt Hodgins," Bones pointed out, faint tears in her eyes as she made her point. As Zack took in what his teacher had said, Bones leaned forward to press her forehead against his, in an awkward moment of sympathy.

"There's…" Zack said, as a tear trickled down his cheek. "You are correct. There is an inconsistency in my reasoning."

"Bones, I need a name," Booth said.

"We know," Bones said.

Booth was willing to give her the last moment to get things together and say what could be her last goodbye to Zack before he was officially arrested, but as Zack began to make his speech about how to find the killer they'd been tracking for months, he wondered if it would have made any difference if he'd spent more time with Zack to try and warn him about some of the more dangerously charismatic people out there…

* * *

  
Walking back into the ICU after taking out Gormoggon, Booth wondered if it was easier to think of that guy as a monster rather than a human. His main room had resembled a sacrificial chamber far more than something should when dealing with a man who didn't know about the supernatural, and Gormogon's teeth had looked disturbingly vampire-like, but all it had taken was one shotgun blast to the chest to put him down.

"Did you get him?" Cam asked.

"Got him," Booth said, leaving it at that; the killer had been a complete bastard, but he wasn't going to discuss that more than he had to.

"Who was he, Booth?" Bones asked.

"Nobody," Sweets said. "Am I right? He was nobody. An invisible man, angry at history for not seeing him."

"Yeah, for a nobody, he sure wrecked a lot of lives," Angela said grimly, voicing Booth's own grim thoughts on that particular topic without requiring him to actually yell at the psychiatrist; the assessment seemed accurate, but he wasn't interested in offering support for Sweet's theories right now.

"Zack confessed to killing the Lobbyist ," Caroline said as she walked out of Zack's room with other lawyers. "Stabbed him in the heart."

"He never ate anybody?" Angela asked apprehensively.

"No," Caroline confirmed.

"So how did this happen?" Angela asked.

"Logic," Bones said.

"No," Caroline corrected the anthropologist. "I'm sorry, Cherie. That might cut it with you eggheads, but this happened the way this always happens: a strong personality finds a weak personality and takes advantage. I hope we fry the guy."

"That's not gonna be necessary," Booth said.

"Good riddance, I say," Cam said, after the team had taken it in.

"What'll happen to Zack?" Hodgins asked.

"I cut a deal," Caroline said. "He pleads guilty, cooperates, and we find him non compos mentis. That way, Zack is moved to a secure psychiatric facility instead of going to prison."

"No, that won't stand up," Sweets objected. "Zack isn't actually insane-"

Booth halted that protest by grabbing Sweets' arm and dragging him away from the rest of the group.

"What?" the psychiatrist protested.

"Sweets?" Booth said, his voice low. "You're gonna give this one to Bones. You understand?"

The psychiatrist may have been able to defend his decision to Bones, but after the way he'd used them to test his theories- Angelus had done that kind of thing far too often for Booth not to recognise when others were doing it- Booth wasn't interested in hearing his defence.

"I understand," Sweets said.

"Good," Booth said, patting the young man on the shoulder before he turned around to rejoin his team.

As the group stared at Zack as he lay in bed, the young man looking sadly back at them, Booth felt as though he was witnessing the 'real' version of the gang's last meeting with Fred before Illyria consumed her; a group of people, fully aware that this may be the last time they saw their friend before something else consumed them completely…

* * *

  
"Probably could have spent more time with Zack," Booth noted, as Hodgins placed a box on the table as he sat with the remaining squints in the Jeffersonian lounge area. "You know, get him to see the world a bit more."

"All those things I say about secret societies and conspiracies…" Hodgins sighed as he stared at the box. "I never knew he was listening."

"I should have gotten him a girlfriend," Angela put in.

"You know what?" Cam said contemptuously. "The hell with Zack. He's an adult, he made his choices. People are who they are. There is nothing any of us could have done for the guy."

"We love Zack, Cam," Bones said.

"Yeah, well, he killed someone," Cam practically spat out. "He deserves to be locked up for the rest of his life."

"I feel I must point out that what Doctor Saroyan just said is obviously her way of handling grief," Sweets put in, as though it wasn't obvious to anyone else. "She doesn't mean it. Quite the opposite, in fact."

"I knew the day I met Zack, he'd cause me pain," Cam said, a statement that Booth knew was a lie but had nothing to say in response that wouldn't just be awkward.

"So," he asked, stuck for anything else he could use to break the ice, "what've you got there, Hodgins?"

"This is, uh, Zack's favourite stuff," Hodgins said, glancing at the box.

"Well, what are we gonna do with it?" Angela asked.

"Where he's going, they might actually let him have it," Cam noted, reaching over to pick out a trophy saying 'Zack Addy – King of the Lab'. "Oh, I got him that."

"Yeah, thanks; he waved that in my face every day," Hodgins said, before he took a book out of the box. "Pocket Kama Sutra. I gave him this so he'd stop asking Booth sex questions."

"Got Zack this before he went to Iraq," Booth added, as he took out a harmonica and gave it an experimental blow.

"Hey," Angela noted, smiling as she took out a piece of paper with a caricature of Zack proclaiming him to be 'King of the Lab'. "I drew this for him."

"It's interesting that all of his favorite things are objects you people gave to him," Sweets noted.

"I never gave him anything," Bones said, shaking her head sadly.

"Brennan, he totally loved you," Angela said reassuringly. "I mean, as much as he was capable."

"But I never gave him anything," Bones said, getting up and walking out of the lounge area. Angela got up to follow her friend, but Booth took a letter from the box and followed his partner down the stairs, wanting to take this one himself.

"'Dear Mr Addy'," he began, reading from the letter as he sat down on the stairs beside her. "'It is my pleasure to offer you the post of my intern in Forensic Anthropology. I choose you from hundreds of applicants because of your knowledge, your desire to learn and because I feel you will find a home here'."

With that said, he put the letter back in the envelope and looked back at his partner. "I think you gave him something great, Bones."

It wasn't much of a comfort after the blow she'd received earlier, but it was the best he could offer right now.


	60. Yanks in the UK

Standing at the side of the lecture hall as he discreetly listened to Bones giving her speech, Booth wished that he could feel more alert; he was doing his best, but it was hard to concentrate when he was still feeling a bit out of it due to jetlag, to say nothing of the disconcerting feeling of being so comparatively close to home after over a century wandering around America…

"In closing my lecture on interstitial lammellae remodeling, I'd like to address some issues that are not strictly confined to forensic anthropology," Bones said from her position at the head of the lecture theatre. "If it's alright with my host, Dr. Wexler."

"Well, yes," the English anthropologist said, "I should think that all the most joyless wonks- and yes I do refer to you, Cyril Bibby- would, uh, embrace the diversion from haversian systems."

"My partner, FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth, gave his lecture at Scotland Yard last night," Bones said. "Agent Booth, could you please stand up?"

When asked about it later, Booth would swear that he had been starting to get to his feet before his partner's second call for his attention; the second one just gave him a better incentive to stand up more promptly.

"Yeah, I'm here," he said, sitting sharply up. "What's up?"

"Agent Booth is the intuitive humanist while I am the logical empiricist, although recently I have seen how destructive pure logic can be," Bones said, as Booth got to his feet and waved politely at the students around them. "My own assistant, the most brilliant young man I've ever met-"

"Ended up, uh, a sidekick to a cannibalistic serial killer," Booth said, trying to finish the awkward sentence for her.

"I-I haven't invited you to join me, Booth, so you can take your seat," Bones said, prompting him to sit down. "What I've learned from Agent Booth is that we scientists must arm ourselves with something other than pure logic."

"Quality which deflects us from an irrational enamoration for the rational," Wexler said.

"Exactly," Bones said.

Booth didn't entirely understand what Wexler had just said- seriously, this guy used more big words than Wesley, Giles, Fred or Willow ever had- but he decided to use the tone as reason to take it as a compliment; he didn't want to get into an argument about that kind of thing right now.

* * *

  
"One of the reasons we moved away from the States was to get away," Roger Frampton said, looking grimly at the team that had just brought him news of his daughter's death. "Now look what happened."

"All right, Mr Frampton," Booth said, trying not to show his discomfort at their current surroundings (Seriously, someone's home should not have this much white and glass in it). "Look, we're very sorry for the loss of your daughter."

"What was it?" the older man asked, looking scathingly at him. "Was it a robbery?"

"We don't know yet," Bones put in.

"I'm gonna need a list of your enemies," Booth added.

"What enemies?" Frampton asked.

"Well, you're a very aggressive American businessman living here in England; you must have enemies," Booth noted

"My daughter was a very sweet, innocent girl," Frampton protested indignantly.

"Not always, Mr Frampton," Bones added, holding up a tabloid newspaper showing Portia topless and a headline talking about the loss of her shirt ( _Men in Black_ might say that the tabloids caught the truth more often than not, but in Booth's experience, they were more often just focused on the lowest common denominator and nothing else; he only checked it out sometimes to try and keep up with the details that some of the more professional papers might have missed).

"What the hell are you asking for anyway?" Frampton asked.

"If you can put that picture away, Doctor Brennan," Heather Miller asked.

"Miss Miller," Booth said, taking advantage of the opportunity, "how close were you with your stepdaughter?"

"Heather and I are not married yet," Frampton corrected as he sat down.

"Portia was like a younger sister to me," Heather said, ignoring the interjection. "We talked about everything: clothes, school, Harry …"

"Harry?" Booth repeated, deciding not to tackle that 'younger sister' comment unless it came up later. "Who's Harry?"

"Lord Henry Albert Bonham," Frampton clarified.

"Right," Booth said, before glancing over at Pritchard. "Is that some kind of a crusty old politician or something?"

"Lord Bonham is a very un-crusty young man, heir to the Duke of Innesford," Pritchard noted; Booth liked his English counterpart well enough- even if she obviously didn't share his vampiric past and Bones's equivalent was a bit of a git- but her attitude could be a bit aggravating at times.

"Right," Booth said. "Harry, Henry, Bonham, whatever. I read the tabloids; there was no mention of Portia dating any kind of royalty."

"The duke wanted it kept a secret," Frampton noted.

"The duke would be the lord's father," Bones whispered over to him.

"I got it, Bones; I understand, OK?" Booth said.

"I'm just trying to help," his partner said.

"I… all right," Booth said; this wasn't the time to clarify that he was well aware of the social hierarchy of the nobility, even if he'd spent most of his past associations with the English upper classes trying to essentially eat them. "So the duke says something and all of a sudden, magically, it happens?"

"Welcome to England," Heather said.

"A murderer is a murderer, no matter how close he is to the throne," Frampton said grimly, which at least improved Booth's opinion of him as he sat up. "Please, help me find out who did this to my daughter."

Booth might not approve of Frampton's attitude at times, but the grief on his face was genuine enough.

* * *

  
"Two weeks and I'd heard nothing from Portia," Harry Bonham said, looking grimly at Booth and Bones as he stood at the opposite side of the room. "I knew it'd turn out to be something terrible."

"You kept your relationship with Portia Frampton a secret," Bones noted.

"It didn't mean I didn't love her," Harry protested.

"Well, where we come from, that's exactly what it means," Booth noted grimly.

"You're quite certain this American has the right to pose these questions?" the Duke asked.

"Tell you what, you call Scotland Yard and the answer is always gonna be yes," Booth countered as he sat down in a nearby chair; he might have had to put up with people turning down his help when he was an unlicensed private investigator, but right now he had full authority from both sides of the ocean and he was going to use it. "So, Portia ever come to visit this, uh, palace?"

"This house?" the Duke said as he sat down in the sofa opposite. "No."

"Why?" Booth asked. "I mean, you were in love with her. Right, lord?"

"Well," Bones said as she sat down in a chair beside him, "it's my understanding that the class system in England, though very much relaxed since the Second World War, still exists at the highest levels of society. That's you, right?"

"One prefers not to make that distinction," Anne Bonham said in response to Bones's question.

"How long did you and Portia Frampton carry on a sexual relationship?" Bones asked.

"Did I ever say I was sleeping with her?" Harry asked indignantly

"Of course you had sex with her, Harry, and I'm sure she rather enjoyed it," an old woman said as she was pushed into the room in a wheelchair by the butler. "You're a well-formed, athletic boy. Did you offer refreshments?"

"I had no intention of encouraging them to stay longer, Mother," the Duke said.

"Tea, please," the apparent grandmother said to the butler before looking at Booth and Bones. "Harry kept his relationship with the Frampton girl secret because her father is a rapacious crook who uses intimidation and bribery to get what he wants."

"So it had nothing to do with this?" Bones asked, holding up the tabloid from her newspaper.

"Oh, they brought that wretched rag into the house," Anne said.

"I was there," Harry cut in. "It was the afternoon before Portia's birthday party."

"So you saw the photographer?" Booth asked.

"Of course not," Harry said grimly. "I'd have thrashed him."

"The lord was gonna go all medieval," Booth noted with a smile, as the butler entered with tea.

"Portia's party was lovely," Harry said sullenly. "She left before I awoke the next morning. That's the last time I saw her."

"But you did hear from her," Bones noted.

"Right," Booth said, pulling out the relevant paper from his pocket, "because cell phone records indicate that you talked that morning."

"It was a very personal conversation," Harry said.

"Did you discuss her pregnancy?" Bones asked.

"I got it," Booth said, as the three generations of Bonhams looked at them in varying degrees of shock. "I'll tell you what. There was an argument, Portia wanted to keep the baby, you didn't…"

"I-I assure you I had absolutely no idea that-" Harry began.

"Could he possibly be suggesting that pregnancy is a motive for murder?" the grandmother asked, looking over at the other three.

"Nonsense," the duke said. "Arrangements would have been made."

"Right," Booth said, deciding to tackle another question rather than voice his own thoughts on treating an unborn child like an inconvenience (He tried to be pro-choice, since it was never clear if a soul existed that early in development, but they should at least be doing it for better reasons than a baby being 'inconvenient'). "And you're positive that you're the father?"

"Harry," the Duke said, as the boy advanced towards Booth.

"Look at that," Booth chuckled. "I'm being intimidated by royalty."

"If you must know," Harry said, glaring at him in frustration. "Portia broke up with me; she said there was to be no discussion."

"Ah, there you go," Booth said, sitting back to take a sip of his tea. "Motive for murder, no matter what country we're in, hmm? What is this?"

"It's Assam black tea," the grandmother said with a smile. "Very strong. Call it the upper class version of a cup o' joe."

"Wow," Booth said, taking another sip of his cup. "Cheers."

* * *

  
"You should look over your other shoulder," Bones said, as Booth tried to parallel park the car after a frustrating drive.

"Bones, I've been driving since I was twelve, OK?" Booth said (It wasn't strictly true, but the context was accurate enough; he'd been driving since the time when Seeley Booth _would_ have been twelve, even if he hadn't been doing it consistently due to his lack of interest in interacting with people at that time of his life).

"Would it make you less agitated if I told you that I didn't sleep with Doctor Wexler last night?" Bones added.

"OK, look, I'm not agitated, OK?" Booth said, ignoring the part of himself that was actually grateful to hear that. "I'm agitated because of driving this little car, that's all. Look, Wexler is just… I'm not agitated because of you and Doctor Wexler; Wexler's just another guy looking for a one-night stand; that's it."

"So?" Bones asked.

"So he doesn't take it seriously."

"Seriously?" Bones asked. "What do you mean? You never laugh during sex? Because I do. Whoa, do you see that lorry?"

"I see that lorry; it's a truck, OK?" Booth said, forcing the car into reverse as he scrambled to get it into a decent position (A small car should _not_ be this hard to move). "We're American and that is a truck."

With his national identity reaffirmed, Booth turned his focus back to the conversation. "I laugh during sex. It's just, it's not that kind of serious."

"Well, I think Doctor Wexler is serious about having sex with me," Bones said. "Very interested."

"OK, news bulletin for ya, Bones; there's not a guy in this country who wouldn't want to have sex with you," Booth noted, relieved that he was making progress with his parking effort. "Probably half the gay men...whoa, easy."

"Are you being nice about me or awful about British men?" Bones asked.

"Wexler is not special; you are," Booth said firmly.

Cam's subsequent call about a new development in Portia's autopsy might have raised a few more awkward questions about the case, but at least it distracted Bones from analysing his description of her as special in particularly great depth in favour of working out new potential motives.

* * *

  
"Oh my God," the man at the Highgate Gentlemen's Club said, after Booth, Bones and Pritchard had revealed Doctor Wexler's death to the man. "Two nights ago, Doctor Wexler was buying drinks for his friends and playing the tables as if he hadn't a care in the world."

"Was he with a woman?" Booth asked, privately amazed that an academic like Wexler had the time for something like this; why was it that so many people felt that they could waste their time and money in places like this…?

"No, this is a gentlemen's club, Agent Booth," Pritchard said.

"I didn't see a stage or a pole or dancers or anything like that," Booth noted, glancing at what he could see of the club's interior from his current position.

"Ah, no; an English gentlemen's' club is for actual English gentlemen," Pritchard explained, before turning back to the employee. "How did Doctor Wexler strike you?"

"Uh, flush," the man said.

"What's that mean?" Booth asked, just remembering to feign ignorance in time; his experience of British slang might have fallen out of practise over the years, but he wasn't that out-of-touch.

"I believe you say 'ro..ro...rolling in the dough'?" Pritchard said awkwardly.

"Huh," Booth said.

"That's right," the man said. "He, uh… he paid off his tab."

"How much did he owe?"

"We're getting into ticklish areas of confidentiality now," the other man said, slightly awkward at that topic. "This is a gentlemen's club after all."

"Scotland Yard will guarantee the F.B.I.'s discretion," Pritchard said. "Isn't that right, Agent Booth?"

"Yeah, right," Booth said.

"Over five thousand pounds," the man said after a moment's pause. "He paid it off in cash."

"Where'd he get that kind of money?" Booth asked.

"I'm sure I have no idea," the man said.

"Please?" Pritchard asked.

"Look, I, um…" the man said, reaching into his pocket for his phone, displaying video footage of Wexler playing craps at a table inside what Booth presumed was the club, "took this, you might say, as a precaution even though Dr. Wexler told us that he knew the gentlemen and everything was fine. This was taken from the security camera."

"Nice tattoo," Booth noted, as two men came up behind Wexler to pull him away from the game with a notable struggle, one man with a distinctive crucifix tattoo on his wrist. "The guy with the tattoo is taking him away."

"If I thought they were going to kill him, then I'd have done something," the man said, as Pritchard walked away, clearly shaken at the sight.

"Don't beat yourself up, pal," Booth said, patting the man on the shoulder. "You know, I'm sure you did the best you could."

He didn't bother mentioning that what this guy could have done was virtually nothing; there was no point rubbing that kind of thing in when facing this kind of situation.

* * *

  
"We're still questioning the female students," Pritchard explained, as they sat in a café near the Thames. "It seems that they're all accusing each other; you know, each one thinking they were special to Ian."

"Is that what you think too?" Booth asked.

"You've been asking questions of your own, I see," Pritchard said, as she put her cup down.

"Apparently you were sleeping with Doctor Wexler," Bones noted.

"Don't you think that was something you should have told us, Inspector?" Booth asked.

"Oh, please," Pritchard, laughing sceptically. "I'm British first, a cop second and a woman third. It's a miracle it ever came to light."

"For how long?" Bones asked.

"Irrelevant," Pritchard said firmly. "What you really want to know is if sharing Ian with other women made me want to kill him."

"Did it?" Bones asked.

"All those pretty, young, female students?" Booth elaborated.

"The thing that made Ian so very, very good in bed was all that practice," Pritchard said. "Sorry. Was that indiscreet? I thought Americans were all brash and forthright."

"And here I thought the Brits were frustrated sexually and repressed," Booth said, as Bones' phone rang, prompting her to turn her attention to whoever was on the other end of the line. "That's a very deep wound."

"Bones, what is it?" Booth asked, curiosity piqued by that comment.

"Ian was stabbed to death," Bones said, before turning her attention back to the phone. "A-and the weapon?"

There was a moment's silence as she listened to the reply before speaking again. "Nice work, Clark; thanks."

She ended the phone call and turned to Pritchard. "Did you find any weapon at Ian's apartment that could have been used to stab him?"

"No, and I was there the whole time," Pritchard said, prompting Booth to exchange brief glances with Bones that even an amateur would have noticed. "You're doubting me."

"Yes," Bones said.

"Wouldn't you?" Booth noted.

He might have liked Pritchard well enough as a cop, but he just wasn't familiar enough with her as a person to be sure what she'd do in a situation like this…

* * *

  
"You think they ever made a Frankenstein in this place?" Booth asked as he walked into the university lab where Bones was analysing Wexler's remains, after putting on an over-exaggerated 'monster' act.

"No," Bones said, still intently studying the bones. "Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster."

"Yeah, 'cause the other way around, that would make no sense," Booth noted; he _knew_ that Frankenstein had been the creator, but couldn't Bones see that it was just a lot easier to think of the monster that way…?

"Bones," he said, his thoughts diverted as he registered the intense expression on the anthropologist's face. "I know that look."

"Me too," Pritchard put in grimly. "Whenever Ian had that look, it meant that things had just gotten more complicated."

"Clark just got the last of the casts and while he was finishing reconstructing the skeleton, he found an extra bone," Bones explained.

"Wexler had an extra bone?" Booth asked, wondering if this was some kind of weird genetic anomaly like an extra rib or something like that…

"No, no," Bones corrected, indicating the piece in front of her on the table. "It's a shattered section of a femur from someone else that the interns here didn't identify."

"Well, every piece of bone you have here was found and cataloged at the scene," Pritchard confirmed.

"Well… maybe he held on to it," Booth suggested. "Bone people like to hold on to bones-"

"I think it's the murder weapon," Bones said.

"Seriously?" Pritchard repeated incredulously, as Booth suddenly found himself remembering Angelus killing the Beast with that knife made from his own flesh; it might not be the same as that precedent, since Bones would have noticed a missing bone in her earlier tests, but was still the kind of victory you remembered even without being in control at the time.

"The entry point of the stab wound is between T6 and T7 extending approximately 22 centimeters through the heart and lungs," Bones continued.

"The killer used a bone to stab Ian?" Pritchard said, staring at the table in surprise.

"Live by the bone, die by the bone," Booth said, trailing off as Bones looked at him in a particularly pointed manner.

"It occurs to me that if we find the origin of the bone, then, well, we find the murderer," Pritchard said.

"That's where the mercury comes in," Bones explained. "This bone displays very high levels of mercury fulminate."

"What does that mean, Bones?" Booth asked.

"Nothing," Bones said.

"That's very useful," Pritchard said.

"I'm more interested in the fact that it's ossified," Bones explained.

"That basically means that it's been turned to stone," Pritchard said as she turned to him.

"No, no. Don't you start explaining things to me now," Booth said, moving around the two women; he knew what ossified meant, but clarifying his knowledge wouldn't help anyone right now and would just make him sound overly defensive. "OK, what is the significance of that?"

"It means it's over two thousand years old," Bones explained.

"I was already working at the top of my game knowing 'ossified'," Pritchard said.

"Two thousand years old puts this bone firmly in the Bronze Age," Bones continued. "The site."

"Oh my God," Pritchard, staring at the bone in shock. "So this bone alone would have prevented Frampton from building his skyscrapers."

"Yes," Bones said.

"Perhaps the murderer used it to kill Ian as a kind of… symbolic revenge for signing the writ?" Pritchard suggested.

"That makes sense," Bones noted.

"No, it doesn't make sense," Booth corrected. "Nobody just kills somebody with a bone symbolically, not even in England."

"So, what then, Agent Booth?" Pritchard asked.

"Well, you have the fire, the cigarette," Booth pointed out. "It was all set out of panic. The killer didn't act symbolically. He acted out of rage."

He might not know bones like his partner, but he knew people well enough to know what motivated that kind of murder…

* * *

  
"You know," Booth mused, as he and Bones finished eating their last English breakfast in the dining hall of Oxford University, "Wexler was kind of like a Robin Hood kind of a character; steal from the rich."

"I turned down my chance to sleep with Robin Hood?" Bones said.

"Sometimes you just take the oddest leap," Booth said, shaking his head slightly before he looked up to see Pritchard approaching, prompting him to put on a jocular English accent. "Hey, Pritch; cheerio, mate."

"'Hello' is fine," Pritchard said, prompting Booth to turn back and look at her as she picked up a knife and tapped Booth on each shoulder before placing a ribbon over his head. "On behalf of her Majesty the Queen of England (she taps Booth on each shoulder) I dub you Sir Seeley Booth, Knight of the Realm."

"Wow," Booth said, looking up at his fellow detective in surprise.

"'Official Junior Knight'," Bones said, examining the ribbon in question.

"Eh?" Booth said, looking at it himself. "Look at that… wait a second; that's from a toy store."

"It doesn't mean you're not Sir Galahad," Pritchard said, smiling warmly at him.

"Thank," Booth said; the actual medal might mean nothing, but it was nice to feel that he was appreciated by a peer for something more than just the amount of people he'd killed.

"I'm sorry about Ian," Booth said.

"Me too," Pritchard said after a brief pause. "It was a real honor working with you both."

"Same here," Booth said, Bones nodding in acknowledgement as well; it had been awkward at times, but she'd been a good ally in this investigation.

"If you need a lift to the airport-" Pritchard began.

"Bones- she got us a limo," Booth said.

"Of course," Pritchard said.

"But if you're ever in the colonies," he added, leaving the invitation open.

"It would be lovely," Pritchard said, before she departed, leaving Booth to deal with some jokes from Bones about Pritchard's interest in him and his unofficial 'knight' status.

Maybe the knighting wasn't real, but he'd enjoy the spirit in which it had been given for as long as he could…


	61. The Man in the Outhouse

"It would be good if you called first," Bones said, as they drove towards their latest crime scene, a slightly petulant tone to her voice.

"Well, who knew you were even dating?" Booth pointed out.

"Well, I wouldn't call it dating," Bones corrected. "We occasionally make arrangements to spend time together."

"I'm just surprised you're not more picky," Booth said, deciding not to discuss that issue as he focused on his more immediate question- the man hadn't exactly struck him as the intellectual type- rather than discuss his own feelings at her having apparently ignored his earlier comment to her during their time in London.

"My relationship with Mark is purely physical, and I am very satisfied with him in that area," Bones said. "Did you see his chest and his thighs?"

"Bones- what-?" Booth said, unable to believe that interpretation of a relationship; he'd screwed a few hot people for the sake of it in the past, but that kind of relationship had been getting old when he was still Liam, and he'd only kept it up as Angelus because he enjoyed killing his partners afterwards.

"Haven't you chosen someone because they were satisfying sexually?" Bones asked.

"There has to be more than sex," Booth protested (Technically, _Angelus_ had done what Bones had just asked about, so that wasn't the issue right now).

"Not really," Bones said dismissively. "Our interests and professions do not intersect."

"Well, what is he?" Booth asked. "Bricklayer? You know, truck driver? Tango dancer?"

"He is a deep-sea welder," Bones clarified.

"Wow," Booth said, suddenly wondering how Bones had met a guy in that kind of profession; he doubted someone like that spent a lot of time on-shore (Which would certainly explain why he was satisfied with their relationship). "I wouldn't even think to put that on the list."

"Well, they work on oil derricks, repair boats," Bones explained. "After being at sea for months at a time, he seems to enjoy having a sexual relationship, so…"

"I'm sure; I am sure," Booth said. "Deep sea welder?"

"He can hold his breath for three minutes down there," Bones said, after Booth had trailed off at the mental images created by his statement.

"Underwater?" Booth asked.

"Of course," Bones confirmed.

He supposed it was an improvement over the days when Bones wouldn't have understood that kind of comment, but he did _not_ need that kind of image when he was already disappointed in his partner's choices.

* * *

  
"OK, great, thanks," Booth said, before terminating the phone call so that he could take to Bones as they drove to their next destination. "O'Roarke and his wife live in Cherry Ridge. Old Bill must have been making a tidy sum."

"Well, he shouldn't have been rewarded," Bones said. "He was perpetuating a primitive and prurient morality by parading victims for the purpose of entertainment."

"Well, you know what?" Booth said, deciding to focus on something final, rather than get into another debate about society. "You cheat on your spouse, you get what's coming to you."

"Anthropologically, eighty-three percent of societies are polygamous," Bones added.

"Now you sound French, OK?" Booth said (Seriously, where did she come _up_ with this stuff?). "Look, being faithful is what separates us, you know, from the chimps."

"No, actually, it's a gene called HAR1F," Bones began.

"We're talking about the Ten Commandments here, Bones," Booth said, not wanting another genetics-related debate. "'Thou shalt not commit adultery'. One down from your personal favourite, 'Thou shalt not kill'."

"Oh, so you also believe that Moses wandered the desert for forty days, climbed Mount Sinai, at which point a supernatural force carved a convenient list of behavioral guidelines on two pieces of rock?" Bones asked

"Yeah," Booth said. "That's why it's on the Supreme Court."

"Fascinating," Bones said.

Strictly speaking, Booth's 'religious inclinations' were more complicated than that, but this was far from the time to discuss that sort of issue, and he wasn't sure how to define the Powers That Be anyway…

* * *

  
"Arthur Lang will only talk through his attorney, who says he was in Atlantic City all weekend playing Keno," Booth explained, as he grabbed a few files from his office. "We're checking out his story."

"He could've hired a hit man," Bones suggested.

"No, this was not a contract job, this was personal and violent," Booth corrected. "OK, Sweets is on his way up with the show tapes to profile for a revenge killer."

"OK, see you later," Bones said, quickly heading for the door.

"Whoa, Bones, wait a second," Booth said, hurrying after her. "Where you going? I thought maybe we could, you know, help out Sweets."

"To a film," Bones clarified.

"Oh, this is much better than a movie," Booth said as they walked. "Hours of fascinating video… Hey, great stories for the deep-sea welder."

"No, actually, I'm going to the film with a botanist," Bones corrected, as she reached the elevator and pressed the button to call it.

"Oh, I get it," Booth said. "You dumped Mark. It's too bad; I kinda liked the guy."

"No, I didn't dump Mark," Bones said. "I'm seeing both of them."

"At the same time?" Booth said, surprised at this new twist (And he _wasn't_ hurt; this had nothing to do with the fact that Bones chose two random people he'd never heard of before over someone who'd been there for her for years).

"Mark and I have a physical connection," Bones clarified. "The botanist, while brilliant and fascinating, just...just doesn't appeal to me in that way."

"OK, so all that stuff you said about monogamy being unnatural, you're just making excuses," Booth said, choosing the most polite term he could think of; Bones wasn't cruel, but she sometimes missed the point.

"I do not make excuses," Bones corrected. "Only people who are ashamed make excuses."

"Bones, two guys at the same time, it's not right," Booth said. "I mean, that's why they invented dueling."

"How can you say-?" Bones began.

"Hey, you guys ready?" Sweets asked, the psychiatrist suddenly walking up to them from the open elevator.

"I know what I'm doing, Booth," Bones said, stepping into the elevator, only for Booth to halt the elevator's descent with his hand.

"My gut says you're going with your gut on this one, and we all know how that ends up," Booth said firmly. "Not good."

"Uh, is there something we need to discuss before getting to work?" Sweets asked.

"No, no," Bones said, saving Booth from having to protest about something he wasn't ready to discuss either. "Just call me when you find something of value."

As Bones pounded the button, she pushed Booth's hand away and the doors closed behind him, leaving him looking awkwardly at the psychiatrist who seemed to enjoy making mountains out of molehills where the two of them were concerned.

"No, it's nothing," Booth said, looking back at the younger man before Sweets could say anything. "It's just… she's got a date."

"Oh," Sweets said. "And how do you feel about that?"

"It's not about me, OK?" Booth said, wishing he'd just left the issue alone rather than risk giving Sweets potential 'ammo'. "Let's go look at those videos."

* * *

  
"So, you sure?" Booth asked as he and Bones walked out of the office, discussing their latest theory about the case.

"Yeah, it's the only person who makes sense," Bones said, before stopping as she registered someone standing in front of the office. "Mark, wh-what are you doing here?"

"Well, you told me to pick you up," the deep-sea welder said, holding a brown paper bag and two large cups. "With dinner?"

"I... am so sorry," Bones said awkwardly. "I... there's been an emergency."

"OK, do you want me to reschedule, or…?" Mark began.

"Temperance," another man said, Booth soon recognising him as the botanist he'd met earlier.

"Jason!" Bones said, clearly shocked at this turn of events. "What are you doing here?"

"We're going to Coldplay, remember?" Jason said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them enthusiastically.

"You remember Coldplay," Booth said; after his earlier issues with Bones's actions, he had to admit that a part of him would enjoy this.

"Coldplay?" Mark said.

"Sorry, I've been distracted by the case," Bones said.

"Why don't we ever go to a concert?" Mark said, looking at her in obvious hurt. "As a matter of fact, why don't we ever leave your bedroom?"

"Can we talk about this later?" Bones asked. "We're about to arrest-"

"You're taking this guy?" Jason asked, in an offended manner that sounded like he was genuinely hurt by this turn of events, which potentially disproved Booth's earlier theory that he was gay.

"I-I don't like that term," Bones corrected. "It has an antiquated moral and needlessly restrictive connotation."

"And who are you?" Mark asked.

"Obviously, a guy who is not doing as well as you," Jason said, his tone further countering the idea that he was gay; he really sounded annoyed at the idea that he wasn't doing that well.

"This is Jason; Jason, Mark; Mark, Jason," Bones said, indicating the two men. "Please understand, Jason, you're very good-looking, but sexual attraction is an involuntary hormonal response involving an increase in neutrophins and testosterone."

"So you get to go out?" Mark said to Jason.

"Mark," Bones continued- how could a woman that smart _not_ realise the hole she was digging herself into? _-_ "you are a strong and attentive man, but Jason is more stimulating, intellectually."

"That's not the only way I could be stimulating," Jason said (If this guy wasn't gay, Booth had to wonder how he'd managed the kind of patience needed to last this long with Bones).

"Uh, murderer?" Booth said, trying to get the conversation back to something important.

"Murderer, yes," Bones said.

"What do you do with this one, Temperance?" Mark asked, looking at Booth.

"Oh, this- uh- Booth is my partner, that's all," Bones said.

"We should go," Booth said, deciding to just smile and move on from that particular issue; trying to defend himself right now would just make everything more awkward.

"Yes, OK, all right," Bones said. "Oh, Jason, we can talk at the concert. I'll meet you out front by 8:00, and Mark, we can talk later at my apartment."

"Oh yeah," Booth said, inwardly cursing Bones's ability to completely miss the point as he grabbed one of Mark's drinks. "See ya, boys, thanks; I'll grab one of those."

Still, he supposed that things could have gone worse; Mark and Jason might not like each other, but at least nobody was actually _fighting_ …

* * *

  
"Hey," Sweets said, as Booth and Bones walked into his office after another successful arrest. "Come on in; you look nice, Doctor Brennan."

"Oh, thank you, uh…" Bones said, looking slightly awkwardly down at her new blue dress. "I was supposed to go to a...gallery opening tonight."

"What, did Jason get a new tight suit?" Booth asked.

"With Mark," Bones corrected.

"Yeah, the two amigos," Sweets said.

"I thought he was more of your, uh, 'stay at home' kind of a guy," Booth asked.

"I was visiting the possibility that I might enjoy him in a strictly conversational setting," Bones admitted.

"And?"

"Since the murder, I'm considering the argument for monogamy," Bones said, her tone a slightly awkward one that would have been far more embarrassed coming from anyone else.

"Write that one down, Sweets," Booth smirked. "I have a positive influence on her."

"No you don't," Bones corrected.

"Yes I do," Booth said.

"Mark broke up with me."

"Oh," Booth said, deciding to focus on the more relevant issue right now after that kind of revelation. "Sorry. Well, what about 'gay Jason'?"

"Him too," Bones said. "I guess they weren't as accepting of each other as I thought, so…"

"Is it typical for you two to discuss your love lives?" Sweets asked.

"Well, I mean, only when she has naked men in her apartment," Booth said (He certainly didn't talk about his own relationships with Bones unless he felt it was relevant, and even then he avoided anything relating to his relationships as Angel or Angelus to save him having to lie too much).

"No, that's not true," Bones said. "I'm very open about my relationships, as opposed to you."

"OK, what's that supposed to mean?" Booth said.

"You're very secretive," Bones said (Booth wondered how she'd feel if she knew just how many secrets he was keeping from her, even if he felt that there was a difference between not bringing something up and keeping it that quiet). "As if discussing your sex life would somehow be offensive to me. I assume you are sexually active."

"I do fine," Booth said, deciding to focus on the essentials.

"Does it seem that your partnership provides a surrogate relationship, making it more difficult to form other bonds?" Sweets asked

"A surrogate relationship wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing because then I could avoid the sting of rejection, which… however fleeting, is still uncomfortable," Bones admitted.

"Right," Booth said, putting aside his initial satisfaction to focus on his partner's current depression. "OK, look; I'm sorry. You know what? If Mark and Jason don't know how lucky they are, they don't deserve you in the first place."

"All relationships are temporary," Bones asked.

"No, that's not true, Bones; you're wrong," Booth corrected her; his own relationships hadn't worked out due to extreme circumstances, but he firmly believed that he could have had a good life with Buffy or Cordelia if fate had given them the chance. "OK, there is someone for everyone. Someone you're meant to spend the rest of your life with. All right? You just have to be open enough to see it. That's all."

After Booth and Bones had spent a couple of moments staring silently at each other, Booth broke the silence; regardless of their scheduled appointment, they needed to do something else right now. "Come on; I'll buy you dinner. Hey, I can be fun in a strictly conversational setting."

"See?" Sweets said as the two of them stood up. "Surrogate relationship."

"Surrogate nothing, OK?" Booth corrected. "It's a meal. With drinks. Just strictly conversational."

"I can come too," Sweets suggested.

"Actually, our partnership does make it difficult to form other bonds- no offense," Bones said as she shrugged on her coat.

"Our session isn't over yet," Sweets said.

"How about Chinese?" Booth asked, ignoring the younger man's attempts to interject as he and Bones headed for the door, planning an enjoyable night out at a Thai restaurant. It was a bit strange to find himself suddenly debating the merits of discount meals to Bones, but they had something casual to joke about after all their earlier relationship-based conversations, and neither of them were ready to end that.


	62. The Finger in the Nest

Booth would never admit it to anyone else- and one of the advantages of his new life was that he'd never have to reveal this to anyone else- but he was actually grateful that he'd never really had a chance to be an actual father to Connor as a child. While he regretted what his son had gone through during his time with Holtz, in a sick way, he almost appreciated that loss, as it prevented him from having to deal with any tainted memories during his already-limited time with Parker.

"You know what the most beautiful thing in the world is?" he said, a football in his hands as he walked through a park with his son.

"Mom says a sunset."

"OK, well, one of the most beautiful man-made things," Booth continued (He had to concede to Rebecca's point; even if the novelty of it had worn off over time, he still enjoyed being able to watch the sun rise).

"Mom says the Mona Lisa," Parker continued.

"Okay, look, all due respect to your mom, buddy, but a perfectly thrown spiral is way better than any of that stuff, OK?" Booth said, crouching down to show his son the ball. "So let me show you how you do this. You put your hand up here like that, spread your fingers wide."

"My hand's too small," Parker said, even as he followed Booth's example.

"It'll grow, alright?" Booth said, as he helped his son adjust his grip. "OK, hand there to steady the ball. Lift it up to your ear… no, your ear, not your chin, silly. Alright?"

"What's it saying?" Parker asked, smiling as he held the ball to his chin.

"It's saying, 'Throw your old man a deep pass for a touchdown'! Hey!" Booth said, running out to catch the ball before running back to tackle Parker. "What? What you got? Whoo?"

As the two 'scuffled, they fell to the ground, each one laughing at the sheer simplicity of the moment together, a moment that Booth had never dared to imagine he'd ever know even after Connor's birth, a moment that was all the more precious for its rarity…

"Hey, there's a bird's nest," Parker said, looking up at the tree above them.

"Where?" Booth said.

"There," Parker said, pointing at a nest in a specific part of the tree, where a particularly thick branch jutted out above them.

"Cool, huh?" Booth said, smiling at the sight. "Hey, you want me to lift you up so you can see inside?"

"How about I knock it down with a perfect spiral?" Parker.

"No, no, no… don't do that, you don't want to do that," Booth said, holding out one hand urgently to stop his son. "That's somebody's home, okay, buddy? Something could be alive in there, okay?" He waited for the young boy to nod in understanding before he continued. "So you want me to boost you up so you can see?"

"Sure," Parker said.

"Alright, you ready?" Booth asked, waiting for his son to nod before he took a hold of his son's waist. "One, two, three and up."

With that, he lifted Parker up so that his son could see into the nest, smiling at the simplicity of the moment; it was a small feat of strength, but all the more precious. "What do you see up there?"

"Higher, a little higher," Parker called down.

"Higher?" Booth repeated. "OK."

"I see something," Parker said, as he peered into the nest.

"Well, if it's an egg, don't touch it because if the mommy bird comes back…" Booth began.

"It's not an egg," Parker said.

"What is it?" Booth asked, as he saw Parker pick something out of the nest that he couldn't quite make out at this angle…

"It's somebody's finger," his son said.

Only long experience with violence stopped Booth from dropping his son in shock; that close call with Epps was the closest he ever wanted to get to having Parker being a part of his professional life, and now _this_?

It wasn't a Connor-taken-to-Quor'toth level of trauma, but it was still more than he ever wanted Parker to experience…

* * *

  
"A human finger?" Sweets asked, the psychiatrist looking anxiously at Parker as he sat in Booth's office while the two adults talked outside.

"Yeah, a human finger, alright?" Booth confirmed, wishing he had a better idea what to expect from all this; almost everyone he'd had to talk to about violent death in the past had been an adult, and he hadn't had much contact with that child who'd killed their victim during that beauty pageant mess. "Look, is my son going to be suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress, you know like suppressed feelings, memories, all that hooey?"

"Well, a child's brain can't process death as an end," Sweets noted. "You know, that's why we tell children that their deceased loved ones are looking down on us from heaven."

"Which they are," Booth said (That was one area where he was grateful he didn't have to 'lie' to Parker about anything; Buffy might not have specified if she was aware of anything on Earth after she returned from Heaven, but at least he knew there _was_ something after).

"Yeah, it's an excellent coping technique," Sweets continued. "You know, grandma isn't worm food, she's simply moved on to a better place."

"Which she did."

"Yeah," Sweets said briefly. "Parker looks good to me."

"So, you talk to him?"

"'Hi, Parker, I'm Dr. Sweets'," Sweets said sarcastically. "'I'm a psychologist and I'm here to talk to you about the human finger that you found'."

"That's great," Booth said. "Could you do that?"

"No," Sweets said. "That could introduce issues that don't currently exist. Just call me if he displays any symptoms of distress."

"OK," Booth said, as the younger man began to walk away. "Any symptoms of distress… Like, um, killing cats?"

"Yeah, sure," Sweets said, nodding briefly at him before walking off.

Booth knew that he was being overly paranoid, but after what had happened to Connor in the end, he felt that he had the right to be cautious about any potential issues with Parker's mental state.

* * *

  
"Hey, Sweets," Booth said, towing Parker into the psychiatrist's office. "You got a minute for me and Parker here?"

"Wow, there you are, actually right here in my office without an appointment or…" Sweets said, before crouching down to address the boy directly. "Hi, Parker. I'm Dr. Sweets."

"His face doesn't look like a baby's behind," Parker said, looking up at Booth.

"Look, OK, he's having nightmares," Booth said, covering Parker's ears and hoping that Sweets would just let that issue go as he spoke in a low voice. "He's, uh, not eating. He doesn't want to go to school and suddenly, he's afraid of meteors."

"Giant flaming rocks from outer space. Who wouldn't be afraid?" Sweets noted.

"You know I can still hear you," Parker looked up at him.

"OK, hum, hum, OK, got it?" Booth said, looking urgently at his son until he started humming before he continued. "I know all this is connected to him finding that finger."

"I'm not some radio advice hack who performs diagnoses over the phone," Sweets protested.

"This is exactly why I brought him here in person," Booth confirmed. "Cure him."

"No, it doesn't really work that way," Sweets protested. "Therapy with a child is…"

"I thought I was going to run out of breath," Parker said as Booth released his hold, recognising that he'd been keeping the kid busy for long enough.

"Yeah, I'm going to run out of breath when I run upstairs to get that warrant from that senile judge," Booth said, using the opportunity to step away from the issue. "Ten, fifteen minutes? Is that good enough time? Okay, see you! Bye, have fun!"

Dumping his son on another man was maybe more a means of avoiding his problem rather than an accepted method of 'curing' it, but he was just using his available resources; if he had access to a professional psychiatrist, he'd be stupid not to use that.

* * *

  
"I got a message that you have something to tell me about Parker," Booth said as he walked into Sweets's office, only slightly surprised to see the younger man relaxing on the couch; he wasn't going to criticise a man for grabbing an opportunity to relax in a comfy chair when he had a lot to do.

"Uh, yeah, yeah," Sweets said, as he turned around to look at him. "Uh, you were right. Parker is traumatized."

Booth couldn't believe it; he went to so much effort to keep Parker safe from his life, and this happened when he was just spending leisure time with him, completely unrelated to a case…

"Uh, it has nothing to do with the finger in the nest."

"Huh?" Booth said, only realising that he'd slumped down into a chair when he found himself looking at Sweets on a lower level.

"He has a girl problem," Sweets said awkwardly.

"Girl?" Booth repeated. "He's six."

"The girl- her name is Stephanie Clyde- she's somewhat large," Sweets explained, holding his hands apart. "Likes to pick him up and carry him around."

"Carry him under her arm?" Booth said incredulously at the image; how old did a girl have to be to be in a position where she could do that to his son?

"Like a pet monkey," Sweets said. "He doesn't know what to do. He says you told him never to hit girls."

"I told him never to hit anyone… You know, unless it was for self-defence," Booth clarified. "She, uh, carries him around?"

"Like a monkey," Sweets nodded. "At recess. She thinks he's cute."

"What about the finger?"

"Parker actually wishes that you'd let him have the finger," Sweets continued. "So he could show it to Stephanie and maybe make her barf."

"Why doesn't he just run away?" Booth asked, trying to focus on the problem he could more realistically handle rather than the finger issue; the idea that his son had wanted a finger to scare someone was a _bit_ disturbing, but it could have been worse…

"Well, when I suggested that, he told me very proudly that his father never ran away from anything."

"Proudly?" Booth repeated, touched at the description. "He said that?"

"I think you know what to do," Sweets said. "I mean, we've all had our Stephanie Clydes, right?"

"No one's ever carried me around like a monkey, especially a girl," Booth said (The problem with a history of fighting demons was that his solutions to that kind of problem tended to rely on doing what he'd told Parker not to do).

"Of course not, me neither," Sweets said, chuckling in a manner that left Booth wondering if that was true for him or not.

* * *

  
As he dug the grave for Ripley, Booth wondered if he should be morbidly grateful for the fact that Bones was participating in this ceremony with him despite her usual beliefs about this whole thing; attending past funerals had always been done more so that she could see the families of the victims achieve closure, but here it was all about giving her a chance to say goodbye…

"Hey, Booth?" Bones asked, as he patted down the last of the earth. "Can I do that?"

"You sure?" Booth asked.

"Yeah, you dug it," Bones said, as she took the shovel and began to fill in the grave for the last few shovelfuls of earth. "So did Sweets help you with Parker?"

"Yeah," Booth said. "I told Parker that it's best to just walk away sometimes."

"What, sometimes?" Bones asked, pausing in the digging to look at him. "Isn't it always better to walk away? You know, this dog would still be alive if he wasn't forced to fight."

"I told him to walk away if it's for himself, and to stand up and fight if it's for someone else," Booth clarified. "I don't know if that was the right thing to say, but…"

"You're a very good father," Bones said, as she finished with the dirt, sighing as she stood back after filling in the last of the earth.

"So… do you want to say something?" Booth asked, unsure how to respond to Bones's earlier compliment.

"Well…" Bones said as she looked at him, "I feel that this dog, Ripley, paid a price that was unfair."

"It's not my fault, Bones, why're you talking to me?"

"What?" the anthropologist shrugged. "You're the only one here."

"Talk to the universe," Booth clarified. "Or God, or Ripley."

"Well, I don't believe in God."

"Well, God spelled backwards is 'dog'," Booth said, trying to lighten the mood with an awkward joke.

"And Ripley is dead," Bones said. "Plus he's a dog, with, you know… limited vocabulary skills."

"Bones, just… just speak from your heart," Booth said.

Even if it was a minor detail, he felt that he'd achieved something when Bones paused for a moment before taking his advice.

"On behalf of humankind, universe, I'd like to apologize for what happened to Ripley," she said, looking at the wood around them. "He was born a cute little puppy… and then the people who adopted him wanted to kill him because they were too stupid to realize that he would grow into a big dog."

"That's good," Booth said quietly.

"Ripley was a good dog," Bones said, choking up as she continued her speech. "He didn't wanna fight… but he did it to please his master. Y'know, he didn't want to attack a human being, but he did it to please his master. You know, it wasn't Ripley's fault that his master was cruel and selfish. Like all dogs, Ripley only saw the good in people. Dogs are like that. People should take a lesson."

With those solemn words, Bones took the dog tag from her pocket and pressed it into the soil over the grave, before she began to press the dirt down with the shovel. "Is that enough?"

"Yeah," Booth said, reaching over to touch her shoulder comfortingly. "As much as any good dog could hope for… even with limited vocabulary skills, OK?"

As Bones started to cry, Booth wrapped his arm around her as she leaned against him, wishing he could offer more than a shoulder to cry on; even if she'd have believed his knowledge of the afterlife, he didn't know how he could explain that without revealing his own history as Angel…


	63. The Perfect Pieces in the Purple Pond

"How many pieces in total?" Booth asked as he walked through the abandoned warehouse where their latest body had been discovered, Bones beside him and a junior agent ahead of him as he tried to moderate his pace to limit the discomfort he was feeling in his back.

Humanity had its ups and downs, but while most of the time the benefits outweighed the drawbacks, the slower healing and susceptibility to non-injury related pain was one thing that annoyed him more often than not…

"Twelve," the other agent said. "Interesting anomaly, no head."

"No head?" Bones repeated. "That's odd."

"Which is why I said 'anomaly'," the agent noted.

"Hey, you don't need to be snippy with my partner, pal," Booth said, cursing his shorter temper as soon as the words were out.

"Booth, it's all right," Bones said, turning to look at him before pausing curiously. "What happened to your back?"

"Oh, nothing," Booth said, trying to sound more certain about that than he really felt.

"Well, you're walking as if you've strained your intertransverse ligament," Bones noted. "I might be able to help with that."

"No, I should never have gone down that small slide with Parker," Booth said; sometimes he got a bit too caught up in spending time with his son while 'reliving' the childhood he'd technically never had for real. "I'll be fine; it's just nothing, OK?"

"Body parts were found in this evaporation pool," the agent said, indicating the pool of water outside the warehouse.

"That's purple!" Booth said, staring incredulously at the bright purple water surrounding each body-part, such an intense colour that it looked like something Lorne would have worn.

"Yeah, kid said it turned purple when he peed in it," the agent explained.

"For future reference," Bones said as she turned back to the agent, "this is more of an anomaly than a missing head."

"Sad comment on your life, doc," the agent noted.

"Again, snippy," Booth said with a firm glare. "You know, if my back wasn't bad, I would hit you."

"Booth, I can take care of myself," Bones said, before turning back to the pond. "Size of the limbs suggest that our victim is a fully-grown male."

"What is with the purple water?"

"Hodgins can analyse it," Bones said, picking up one of the salvaged body-parts from a nearby table.

"Alright, don't tell me," Booth said, as Bones studied the remains, "you want the entire purple pond drained and shipped back to the Jeffersonian?"

"No, I think a small sample will do," Bones said.

"Great!" Booth said, relieved that his job wasn't going to be made more difficult by his partner's desire for thorough research for once…

"Although…" Bones mused. "Skulls are heavy, the head could have sunk to the bottom… you are correct; we should drain it."

"We're draining it; drain it!" Booth called out, while muttering under his breath in frustration at himself for unintentionally making the job harder; demon-hunting might have been a challenge, but at least it was generally all over quickly…

* * *

  
"If your back doesn't hurt, then why are you letting me drive?" Bones asked.

"Well, you know what? Don't get used to it, OK; I heal really, really fast," Booth said, before getting the conversation back to what mattered; his healing might not be as good as it was when he was a vampire, but he was still fairly quick to recover for a normal human, so he wasn't going to focus on the back when there was something else to occupy their attention. "My guys, they didn't find the victim's head in the pool, alright? But I put out a bulletin to orthopedic doctors within two hundred miles of the body drop-"

"Body parts drop," Bones corrected. "The victim was killed, chopped up and then dropped."

"Breaking in a new intern, aren't you?" Booth smiled.

"How did you know?" Bones said, surprised at his comment.

"Well, because, you know, you always get overly precise... that's how I usually know," Booth explained with a brief smile; Bones might be a tricky person to get to know at times, but he liked to think that he was making progress on that front. "Hey, so, you want me to uh, talk to them, break them in a little bit?"

"No, Booth," Bones said. "You don't need to fix everything for everyone all the time, you know? I can handle myself."

"Partners watch out for each other," Booth said firmly.

"Well, if that were true, you'd let me fix your back."

"My back is fine, alright? All I need is an aspirin, a hot bath, maybe a nice single malt scotch," Booth said, trying to turn attention back to the case. "We cross referenced Ehler-Danlos Syndrome-"

"Ailers-Donlohs," Bones corrected.

"Those," Booth continued. "Those kiddy Ange tracked down, okay, we came up with this guy here."

"Oh, Jared Addison, twenty-five years old," Bones said, leaning over to examine the screen, prompting a brief argument about whether or not she was watching the road before they could get back to the issue at hand of identifying their victim.

* * *

  
"It wasn't blood," Cam said to the team as they all stood around the forensics platform. "On the shovel, it wasn't blood."

"Bones' magic juice didn't work," Booth said in frustration.

"No, phenolphthalein is not magic," Bones corrected him.

"It's an indicator that reacts with-" Hodgins began.

"Potato protein," the new intern- a guy called Wendell Bray, apparently- finished.

"Potatoes?" Angela repeated in surprise.

"Yeah," Hodgins confirmed. "Fenalphaline turns pink in the presence of potatoes."

"I locked the guy up because of potatoes?" Booth said, unsure if he should laugh or curse at the bizarre nature of their situation.

"He might have done it, Booth," Bones corrected in her usual manner. "But we all know that without the victim's head, we aren't likely to solve this murder."

"Well, maybe Wendell here missed something in the bones," Hodgins suggested.

"I didn't," Wendell said firmly.

"Don't blame Wendell; he's doing very well," Angela confirmed, smiling reassuring at the younger man.

"I just wish Zack were here, that's all," Hodgins said in frustration.

"You gotta get over it," Booth said. "Zack's not coming back."

"I know where to find the victim's head," Zack suddenly said from behind them, prompting the entire team to turn around and stare at the former team member and current mental patient, standing casually at the door in a white asylum outfit and black gloves around his damaged hands.

"This is not good," Cam said after the initial shock had passed.

"How did you get out?" Bones asked.

"You don't appear happy to see me," Zack said uncertainly.

"Oh, we're not," Booth said firmly; regardless of his suspicions about whatever Zack had really done to that guy, the former intern was still in a mental institution, which meant that any case where he was involved would automatically need to be handled just a little bit more carefully than usual to make sure everything fell into place…

"Well I am!" Bones said, smiling as she walked past him towards her former student. "I really am! Zack!"

"Hey buddy!" Hodgins said, as he and Angela joined Bones in embracing their former teammate.

"Well, I doubt he got a weekend pass," Cam noted.

"Zack," Booth said, staring at the intern in exasperation, "how'd you get out?"

"Doctor Sweets helped me," Zack said.

"Oh, well, then I totally change my mind about Sweets," Angela grinned. "I now love him."

"Does Doctor Sweets know that he helped you?" Cam asked, tackling the question that Booth had just been wondering about himself.

"No," Zack said, before turning to Bones as she stood beside him, a tight grip on his forearm. "You're hurting my arm."

"Oh, sorry," Bones said, releasing her grip on her former student.

"Alright," Booth said, stepping forward to retake control of the situation. "Zack, you're with me and Bones. The rest of you, go play with your microscopes or whatever it is you do. Let's go, Bone Room, now. March."

If they were going to solve this case with Zack's help, he'd like to get it done now so that they didn't have to worry about someone learning that they were tackling a case with the aid of a known mental patient.

Besides… maybe he was just being a bit prejudiced after his past experiences of the mentally unstable included Drusilla and Dana, but even if he knew Zack wasn't like them, he wanted to get as far away from that particular set of implications as quickly as possible.

* * *

  
Dropping Zack off at the asylum had actually been a slightly depressing task for Booth.

He might be fairly sure that Zack wanted to be there even if he was also fairly sure that Zack wasn't actually insane- he'd met crazy people in the past, and Zack just wasn't the type to be convinced that murder was a solution anyway- but that didn't make it easier for him to leave someone he'd once considered a weird sort of friend in a mental institution.

He could make himself feel better by arguing that it was Zack's own way of seeking atonement for his past, but it didn't stop him from wondering if he could have helped Zack if he'd spoken to him about the whole thing earlier…

When he walked into Bones's office after dropping Zack off, he wasn't sure what he'd been expecting to find after the potentially emotionally trying experience of seeing Zack again, but the sight of Bones dumping whole sheets of paper into a waste-paper basket was definitely not on the list.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Throwing out my book," Bones said briefly.

"It's still on your hard-drive, right?" Booth asked.

"Nope; not any more."

"You erased it?" Booth said, shocked at this news.

"Yeah," Bones confirmed.

"Woah," Booth said, stepping forward to grab the latest batch of pages before they could be added to the bin. "Woah, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop!"

"But I don't want to be a writer any more," Bones said.

"Oh, why?" Booth countered, as he grabbed the rest of the papers from the basket. "Because of what that publisher said? He was an idiot, did you see his glasses?"

"But I don't want to be a sexy scientist," Bones protested.

"Well that's like me saying I don't want to be a sexy FBI agent; we can't change who we are," Booth said (Technically, he'd changed who he was when he became Seeley Booth and stopped being Angel, but that was a different matter as he'd been changed by external sources).

"Oh god," he said, as his attempt to pick the pages out of the garbage was hampered by a surge of pain. "This is just… this is not good for the back."

He paused for a moment to think about what to say next before the perfect words came to him

"Suspenseful, and chilling, Temperance Brennan leads the pack. Anthropology has never been more exciting."

"You memorised my reviews?" Bones asked, looking at him in surprise.

"Angela can scan these, and get them back on your computer," Booth said.

"You know my reviews, Booth, but do you read my books?" Bones asked curiously.

"Every word," Booth said firmly; after so long having to hide what he did from the world, there was something he really enjoyed about the chance to see Bones's perspective of the work they did, even if she never explicitly used anything from their cases in her books.

"You never said anything."

"Well, I figure, you know, I'm all over your real world, why would you want me in your fantasy world too?" Booth asked, as he finally pulled out the rest of the pages and offered the manuscript back to her.

"I can appreciate that," Bones said, as she took the pages back.

"You see?" Booth grinned. "How this works, huh? It's give and take. We're partners, huh?"

"Except you won't let me fix your back."

"Oh, come on, my back is fine, it's just-" Booth began

"Oh really?" Bones asked as she stood back up.

"OK, how do I know you're not gonna, like, paralyze me or make it worse?" Booth asked, the two staring at each other in silence for a moment before he gave in and nodded briefly in acceptance.

"I also help you by explaining a lot of things to you," Bones noted as she moved behind him.

"Yeah, well, you know, I explain things to you just as much as you explain things to me," Booth pointed out, as Bones put her arms under his shoulders and placed her hands on the back of his neck.

"Well, my things are more important."

"That's debatable-" Booth began, before a surge of agony blared through his back as Bones forced his head back.

"Ah, necessary pain," Bones said.

"Yeah, necessary," Booth said, as Bones rotated his upper body. "Ah, the way you really help me is, is… you let me be a guy."

"I help you be a guy?" Bones repeated.

"Yeah, you know, it's a guy's thing to fix things and make them right," Booth said, as Bones released his grip. "When I fix things I feel like I am one with the universe."

His explanation was cut short as Bones hit him below the spine. "Oh! Ah. Woah! God! That's amazing. How'd you do that?"

"See?" Bones said, as he turned around to look at her. "We help each other. Quid pro quo."

"I know what that means," Booth said with a smile. "Quid pro quo."

"I'm sure you do," Bones smiled back at him.

"I know a lot of things."

"Well, you didn't know what misophobia meant."

"Well you didn't know that you could just take coffee grounds because it's garbage; you don't need a warrant for that," Booth replied, smiling as he and Bones fell back into their usual post-case banter, smiling warmly at each other as they chattered before heading out of the office and off to the diner for another congratulatory drink after a hard day's work.


	64. The Crank in the Shaft

"The conscious mind represents only one-sixth of our brain's activity," Sweets said, as the three of them sat in the psychiatrist's office. "Now, I want you to both appreciate the power of the subconscious and our quests for its secrets as we…"

"Stop!" Bones said in a resigned tone.

"Doctor Brennan, you can't dismiss over a hundred years of psychological research-" Sweets began indignantly.

"I'm not even actually listening," Bones said, reaching over to place a hand on Booth's knee, halting a bouncing motion that he hadn't even realised he was doing until he suddenly couldn't do it any more, prompting him to start moving the other knee before Bones placed her hand over it as well. "Your leg has not stopped moving since we started this session… Something you should have noticed."

"I assumed he was anxious to leave, as he is every session," Sweets clarified.

"Yeah, well, that's not it," Booth said firmly. "OK, a guy at work, Special Agent Graham Kelton died last week."

"I'm so sorry," Sweets said sympathetically.

"That's awful, Booth," Bones said. "Were you good friends?"

"No, he was a creep," Booth said firmly; in his opinion, Kelton had spent far too much time digging in some of the dirtier cases for him to ever feel completely comfortable with the guy (The old 'I was undercover' excuse stopped being effective after a certain point).

"Oh," Sweets said. "So your agitation comes from…"

"Kelton had the best desk chair in the office building, alright?" Booth explained. "Lumbar support, cushioned arms, Macintosh oak finish."

"And?" Sweets asked.

"And I want it," Booth said; it was a petty detail, but he had the right to feel a bit selfish after everything he'd had to sacrifice to get to this point, as far as he was concerned. "I put a request in, but so have all the other agents. I mean, this is one sweet chair."

"You are anxious that you won't get a dead man's chair?" Bones asked.

"Right," Booth said. "Mine, it won't even recline anymore. Get this: Charlie Baron, okay, he'd been putting a request in to Human Resources even when Kelton was on his deathbed. Alright, is that low or what? Hey, Bones, maybe you can write me a doctor's note saying that I need the chair."

"What?" Bones asked.

"Yeah, something along the lines, that I got, like, a bad back, and the extra lumbar support could enhance my job performance," Booth elaborated; keeping his voice low when Sweets was sitting right in front of them might be pointless, but it just felt right to talk that way when making this kind of request.

"I'm not a medical doctor," Bones said

"The answer's no," Sweets said as Booth turned to look at him. "You're obviously trying to enhance your status with your coworkers by acquiring something that they all covet."

"You want a throne," Bones continued.

"Back support, OK?" Booth corrected; he wasn't interested in the chair as a status symbol, particularly since he'd be keeping it in his office where nobody could really see it most of the time, but more as a comfortable place to sit. "I'm just looking for a little back support."

"Perhaps you've been feeling inadequate at work lately," Sweets began to speculate. "Compensating in this…"

The sound of his phone ringing gave Booth just the chance he needed to get out of another frustrating debate; he just wanted a comfortable chair, why did Sweets feel this need to analyse _everything_ in his life?

* * *

  
"Patty Hoyle," Booth explained, as he and Bones headed towards the area where the woman in question had worked. "She's one of the people who didn't check into the building."

"Angela's sketch matches the picture on her ID card," Bones noted as she studied the item in question. "Wait, so Cam is actually going to write you a letter so you can get the chair?"

"That's right," Booth smiled, even as he kept his voice low to avoid giving anyone around them a poor impression. "She understands how the game is played."

"She worked for the same man as you," Bones said, in that familiar tone she used when she didn't understand an expression.

"That's right."

"The man who doesn't exist."

"Wow," Booth said, staring around the office out of a lack of other conversation topics to get him out of having to explain that figure of speech. "Can you imagine working in a place like this?"

"No," Bones confirmed. "It's not sterile, and there's no room for diagnostic equipment or sufficient bone storage."

"Bones, I meant the little cubicles," Booth clarified, waving his fingers slightly to indicate the appropriate areas; he couldn't understand how people could be comfortable in such a confined, isolated area like this on a long-term basis, surrounded by people but simultaneously discouraged from talking to them. "Look, they look like caged animals."

"Throughout history, you can find examples of human beings adapting to virtually any environment," Bones countered. "Like you and the chair."

"Me?" Booth said dismissively. "You're way off-base."

As he walked up to the reception desk, Booth wondered why this woman seemed to be putting _everyone_ on hold rather than actually answering at least one question, but she at least stopped answering the phones when he flashed his badge; he preferred the freedom he'd had as Angel, but it nice to have some actual authority as Booth.

* * *

  
"So forensics couldn't find any prints?" Bones asked, as the two of them examined the elevator door where their victim had to have been dumped.

"No," Booth said, after confirming his inability to fully open the doors (Ironically, this was one area where his vampiric strength would have been a disadvantage; he could get through these kind of doors easily enough as Angel, but he would have been useless at working out how much strength he'd needed to use to do that), leaning against the wall. "Cleaning crew came in over the weekend and wiped down all the elevator doors."

"Eh, no blood," Bones noted as she ran an ultraviolet light over the area by the door. "What's that?"

"What?" Booth glanced down at the anthropologist.

"That," Bones said, indicating the pastry box near his feet that he'd forgotten to leave in the car earlier.

"Those are my cupcakes," Booth said defensively. "I got them for the HR officer at work. I heard she loves them."

"So fraud and bribery?" Bones asked.

"No, twelve years of service and lumbar support, OK?" Booth corrected; all he was doing was giving the woman in question a reason to pay attention to him over other candidates, rather than actively making her any kind of explicit offer. "It's all a matter of perception."

"OK," Bones said dismissively as she stood back up.

"Don't say it like that," Booth said, hurt as his partner smiled while pulling off her gloves. "'OK', like I'm some kind of kid."

"OK," Bones said again.

"It's looking pretty good, too, Bones," he continued, trying to get the conversation away from his method to focus on the end result. "I mean, Willie Ackerman, he got cut off the list 'cause he got his note from an acupuncturist, and that doesn't even count. Hah! Boob. Watch out, I'm going to try this again."

He paused for a moment to continue testing the elevator doors before he gave up; he could have done this when he was a vampire, but this wasn't those days and he didn't have that old strength. "Oh, man… Ah, forget it! There's no way that I could keep that open long enough to dump a body, and I'm in shape."

"Must have been someone that was stronger than you," Bones noted.

"You're kidding me," Booth countered incredulously. "Have you seen the people in these offices? Compared to them, I'm Hercules."

"Well, apparently not," Bones said. "Maybe you do need that chair."

"Or maybe it was two people," Booth speculated, as another idea came to him

* * *

  
"A staple?" Booth said incredulously as he looked at Bones at the other side of the diner table, Bones just giving a brief mutter in response as she ate. "How do you kill someone with a staple?"

"It perforated the thinnest part of the calvarium- the squamous temporal bone- causing Miss Hoyle's preexisting aneurysm to rupture," his partner explained.

"And how do you get someone to stand still while you staple them?" Booth asked, trying not to think too much about the image that the anthropologist had inspired in his mind; it made sense, but it was still twisted in his view.

"There's a small depression near the wound that suggests the stapler was thrown," Bones clarified.

"So whoever did this didn't mean to kill her," Booth noted.

"No, I can't confirm that," Bones replied as she swallowed her latest mouthful.

"It's common sense, Bones," Booth noted. "One doesn't usually use a stapler as a murder weapon, and they certainly couldn't have known that she had an aneurysm."

"I'll concede on both points," Bones acknowledged.

"Tell you what," Booth said, as Bones took a sip of her coffee. "My boys are looking for the murder weapon; maybe we can pull some prints."

"So Patty has sex with someone who then hits her with a stapler," Bones mused. "Odd work environment."

"OK," Hodgins said, as he walked up and sat down beside Bones at the table, saving Booth from having to respond to that weird comment, "you are not going to believe this."

"Yeah, try topping death by office supplies," Booth noted.

"I was wracking my brain over the trace analysis from the sweater," the entomologist explained. "Furfural, proteolytic enzyme, triarylmethane dye…"

"Hodgins," Booth said firmly, waving a hand over his face. "Eyes are glazing over."

"It's a blue Hawaiian."

"What's a blue Hawaiian?" Bones asked.

"Well, it's a potent cocktail," Booth clarified. "Two of those puppies and you're asking yourself, 'Hey, why am I naked and who are all these people'?"

"Brilliant blue FCF from the blue curacao, furfural from the rum, proteolytic enzyme- pineapple, alcohol speaks for itself," Hodgins elaborated, when Bones just looked at him in a bemused manner at his description.

"Is this the sort of beverage they would serve at the Paradise Isle?" the anthropologist asked.

"Yeah, it comes in one of those ceramic monkey heads," Booth said, quickly shifting topics when Bones looked quizzically at him (He'd checked it out once while he was on a date; was it his fault the girl had weird taste?). "So the killer must have stepped in a spilled drink."

"Given the level of fructose and sugarcane, it would have adhered to his shoe," Hodgins agreed. "He stomps on the victim, and presto, her sweater lights up with more traces than a luau pig."

"Dave was at Paradise Isle, but his alibi checks out," Bones noted, as Booth pulled his plate away from Hodgins as the entomologist reached for one of his fries.

"Yeah," Booth mused thoughtfully. "But Dave was there with Chip, who gave him a ride home, but we don't know what Chip did for the rest of the night. Good work, Hodgins."

"Thanks," Hodgins said.

"Now you can have a French fry," Booth added, pushing his plate back across the table.

"Hey, man, right?" Hodgins grinned, before he leaned over to talk in a lower voice. "Hey, you know, uh… I think Angela and I are cool now. We talked, and I think…"

Booth was frankly relieved when his partner's phone suddenly rang; it gave him just the opportunity he needed to get out of the diner without having an awkward conversation with Hodgins about moving on from old relationships when he'd never managed to really pull that off himself until he'd cut off all contact with them.

* * *

  
"I see you got your throne," Bones noted, walking into his office as Booth tested his new chair, spinning it around as he took in its presence.

"That's right," Booth grinned, giving it a slightly jocular 'dust'. "The chair."

"Looks nice," Bones commented. "Another victory for the hive."

"HR said you called," Booth noted

"Yes, but I didn't lie to them," Bones noted as she sat down on the other side of his desk. "I wouldn't do that."

"Well, you must have said something because she didn't even eat her cupcakes and the chair was here."

"No," Bones said. "I just told them why I felt it was important for you to have it, that's all."

"And, uh, why is that?" Booth asked, as he sat down and adjusted his position in the chair, enjoying the initial comfort. "Because even a mindless drone deserves some perks?"

"No, because of how important you are to them," Bones explained. "I mentioned your dedication and courage and sensitivity."

"Sensitivity?" Booth repeated.

"Yes, Booth," Bones confirmed. "I mean, even today with that young woman who killed her boss, it's very impressive."

He'd spent a long time improving his people skills since becoming one himself, but moments like that _really_ helped him feel good about the progress he'd made since he became Booth…

"Anyway," Bones continued, "I said that a chair is a good way to show the other employees in the office how much those qualities are valued."

"Well, it worked," Booth grinned appreciatively at her.

"I'll never understand why you felt you had to lie to get the chair," Bones commented. "I mean, you could have just told them about yourself on your own."

"Well, because that would have been bragging, even though it was true," Booth said, grinning as he leant back in his new chair, appreciating the comfort offered by the new support… until the sound of something cracking behind him killed the mood.

God, why was he the only thing he'd encountered that genuinely got better with years and years of age behind it?


	65. The He in the She

Nodding at the police officers guarding the yellow tape of their latest crime scene, Booth was torn between enjoying the opportunity to see a beach for a change and dealing with the knowledge that they were here on business; he knew that murder could happen anywhere, but it was still frustrating to see it taint an area like this…

"Mr Nigel-Murray, what are you doing here?" Bones asked, as a young thin man walked up from the water-line alongside Cam.

"We decided to utilize some of your brighter grad students until we find a full-time forensic anthropologist, remember?" Cam asked.

"Do you consider yourself one of my brighter grad students, Mr. Nigel-Murray?" Bones asked, looking critically at the young man.

"Yes," the young man confirmed. "And so do you, Doctor Brennan."

"I am not calling this kid Mr. Nigel…anything," Booth said, not wanting to consider the deeper reason for that distaste; he'd had enough to deal with when he had first met Wesley, before the guy was sacked from the Council and relaxed his attitude.

"Vincent," the young man said. "Or Vince. Or Vinnie, Vin, Vincenzo. Actually, uh, I had this girlfriend once who used to call me Vino Delectable because of how my, eh…"

As Bones joined him in staring at the young man, the grad student realised that he'd gone too far and changed subject. "You don't… need to know that. Uh, what do you need me to do first?"

"I need you to go back to the lab," Bones said.

"I thought perhaps you might want Vin…cent to shadow you, get a real sense of what you do," Cam pointed out.

"Little known forensic fact: tongue prints are as distinctive as finger prints," Nigel-Murray said. "I can be useful in the field."

"I need a forensic anthropologist in the lab so I can spend my time aiming Agent Booth in the right direction," Bones said.

"'Aiming Agent Booth'?" Booth repeated, looking critically at her. "Like a hose?"

"Well, here; take my car," Bones said, handing her keys over to the young man. "I'll get a ride with Booth… how were these remains found?"

"Well, let me aim you in this direction, OK, Bones?" Booth said, trying to conceal the worst of his distaste as Bones studied their latest corpse, which appeared to be missing everything from the thighs on down.

"Two… let's call them hippies… found these remains this morning," Cam said.

"Deadheads," Booth mused, glancing at the hippies in question as they spoke with one of the other agents; he'd never really got the appeal of the hippie drug culture even when witnessing it first-hand.

"Oh, I sold veggie burritos and followed Phish one whole summer," Cam said. "It was fantastic."

"I'm not able to ascertain sex without a pelvic bone," Bones noted, which spared Booth having to think of his own hippie-related story.

"Well, if this scrap of cloth is a bathing suit, then probably female," Cam noted, indicating the purple scraps over the chest.

"Are you good at estimating time of death for submerged corpses?" Bones asked.

"Heavily degraded by crab and fish," Cam noted. "Two to three weeks? That could be a breast implant."

"Breasts- that's my department, OK?" Booth said, already regretting the way he'd phrased that even as he committed himself to finishing that sentence. "You give me a serial number, my guys will be able to track that down."

"Why is there only half a skeleton?" Cam asked.

"Because the spine has been severed," Bones answered in her usual direct manner.

"So, severed spine equals foul play," Booth noted.

"No, not necessarily," Bones pointed out.

"So, an accident?"

"No, it was foul play," Bones corrected herself.

"I just said that," Booth noted; he was all right with his partner not wanting to commit herself to anything, but when she changed her mind that quickly…

"This hand has sustained trauma," Bones clarified.

"Shark attack!" Booth smiled.

"No," Bones corrected, indicating the damaged hand. "The fingers got smashed from what looks like multiple blows. That suggests foul play and…not by a shark."

"We'll have Hodgins take a close look for particulates," Cam said.

"OK, great," Booth noted. "So what do we do next?"

"Find the other half?" Bones asked, looking out at the ocean before them as she spoke.

Booth didn't need his own experience of being sunk by Connor and Justine to know that such a search was going to take a _very_ long time…

* * *

  
"So," Bones said, studying the file for their current victim, "her name is Patricia Ludmuller, RR#1, Maylor Island, Maryland."

"Yeah, reported missing three weeks ago," Booth continued. "Presumed drowned after she didn't come back from her morning swim."

"Very striking facial features," Bones mused.

"Yeah, well," Booth mused, "according to your Mr.… what's his name?"

"Nigel-Murray?"

"Yeah," Booth acknowledged. "Those were mostly artificial too."

"How many people live on Maylor Island?" Bones asked.

"I'd say about a couple thousand; that's one of those end-of-the-world places where the weirdoes flock."

"Why go to this much trouble to make yourself look beautiful and then move to the end of the world?" Bones asked.

"Well, the background check on her turned up suspiciously little, all right?" Booth explained. "There's no credit cards, no driver's license; officially, she didn't exist before five years ago."

"Witness protection?" Bones asked.

"No, marshals say she's not one of theirs," Booth noted. "But, you know, sometimes they lie."

"If you really wanted to hide, you wouldn't make yourself look beautiful," Bones mused.

"Well, if you want to hide, Bones, you'd change your looks as much as you can," Booth clarified.

He might not have changed his appearance that much, but when you went from being a vampire with a soul to being a human, it wasn't exactly hard to hide when most people thought you were dead and definitely _wouldn't_ be looking for someone who clearly had no problem with sunlight.

* * *

  
"A transgender?" Sweets asked, as he sat with Booth and Bones in their office.

"Post-op," Bones corrected. "She had female sex organs."

"So if she had sexual reassignment surgery, she would be a transsexual," Sweets noted.

"How do they do that?" Booth wondered.

"They split the penis, and then turn it inside out- carefully, so as not to damage the nerves- and then they use the glans to create a nerve cluster dense enough to achieve orgasm," Bones explained.

"OK, new rule," Booth said, noting that Sweets at least seemed to be just as uncomfortable as he was at that discussion. "No surgical details, all right?"

"Generally, transgendered people feel that they're the victim of a cosmic mistake," Sweets said, trying to get the topic back to his own area of expertise. "They're certain, from a young age, that they were born into the wrong body. Surgery and hormone treatments are a way to correct that biological mistake."

"Which is why Patricia Ludmuller's past only went back five years," Bones noted.

"Are pastors allowed to think that God makes those kind of mistakes?" Booth asked, tossing Sweets the baseball he'd been toying with; he might have had experience of literally supernatural anomalies, but the restoration of his soul and Connor's existence had been the result of fortuitous bits of magic rather than anyone making a mistake somewhere.

"Do you think God makes that kind of mistake?" Sweets countered, tossing the ball back to the agent.

"I think that God expects us to overcome certain things," Booth said, deciding to adopt the most diplomatic term he could think of to describe his feelings on that issue.

"The term 'trans' conveys a meaning of 'beyond the cross'," Sweets noted. "Moving further. There's a very spiritual component."

"Let's say some hyper religious fundamentalist finds out that Sister Patricia used to be Father Paul …" Booth speculated.

"And murders her," Sweets noted. "OK, you mentioned that there was an intense message on Patricia Ludmuller's answering machine, right?"

"Yes," Bones confirmed.

"If, say, she had sex with a man, and then informed him that she was transgender, isn't that a more likely motive for murder?"

"Anthropologically speaking, a male's status in a society is closely connected with what he perceives to be his outward maleness," Bones acknowledged.

"Look, there's no way the guy on that answering machine knew that he… she… he... knew that she... he...was transgender," Booth interjected, wishing he'd straightened out the appropriate gender term in his head before he started that sentence.

"How do you know?" Bones asked.

"Well, because I know an "ain't too proud to beg" phone call when I hear one, all right?" Booth said. "He had no idea that she wasn't a real woman."

"That's very insightful," Sweets said.

"Thank you," Booth said. "Insightful; see?"

"Except for the 'real woman' slip," the psychiatrist continued, once again lowering Booth's opinion of the kid; sometimes, would it be asking too much for this guy to leave things alone?

"Have you made many of these 'ain't too proud to beg' calls in the past?" Bones asked in a teasing manner.

"What do you say we just stay focused here?" Booth asked.

"OK, have you ruled out completely that Patricia Ludmuller's murder might be because of something that happened before he became a woman?" Sweets speculated.

"I put a request in to find out his previous identity before _he_ was a woman; that's the best I could do," Booth said, before deciding to settle this issue. "OK, from now on, he is always a she. She was a she when she died, so she deserves the respect due to him or her...okay, person!"

"OK…" Bones said. "I'm a genius, and I'm confused."

With nothing else to do, Booth put the baseball on the table and rested his head against it; finding the right terms for the victim in this mess might be frustrating, but there was nothing else he could do about it right now.

* * *

  
"Pastor Patricia was our center," the man leading the ceremony said, as the Maylor Island congregation gathered around the beach for the final service. "Like the best leaders, she drew us together without even trying."

"Did you release identity?" Bones asked, looking urgently at Booth as the service leader continued speaking.

"Their pastor went for a swim and never came back, all right?" Booth noted. "The body washed up."

"Intuitive leap; right," Bones nodded in understanding.

"Let's pray together," the man said, holding out a hand to a man in a wheelchair beside him. "Let's pray that whatever happened to Patricia out there alone came peacefully, that God embraced her as His daughter… That there was no pain, only God's great serenity."

"A moment of silence for the pastor we loved so much," the man in the wheelchair added.

"What are you doing?" Bones asked, looking over at Booth in surprise.

"I'm praying," Booth noted. "Would you keep your voice down?"

"Sorry," Bones said in a low voice. "You're not a member."

"It's not a gym, Bones," Booth countered, giving the congregation the moment of silence before moving forward to talk to the man leading the service. "Excuse me, Mr, uh…"

"Wade Schmidt," the man said. "You're FBI?"

"How did you know that Patricia Ludmuller was the victim found in the bay?" Bones asked.

"She's a member of our community, and she's gone; we feel her loss," Wade explained. "We're right, aren't we?"

"Yes," Bones said.

"Is there a… a vice pastor?" Booth asked. "Somebody else we can talk to?"

"Not really," Wade said, indicating the man in the wheelchair. "I take care of the finances. Chuck, over there, he acted as kind of an unofficial assistant to Patricia."

"What will happen to the church now?" Bones asked.

"To be honest, I'm not optimistic that we'll survive Patricia's loss," Wade said.

"Why?" Bones asked. "You're a community of people with a common superstition; the shared illusion should be enough to bind you."

"Bones," Booth said, unable to believe his partner's attitude at times; it sometimes seemed like she was just trying to provoke a fight with anyone who might disagree with her…

"Patricia would like you," Wade smiled. "She'd say 'That's the one that will keep us honest'."

"See?" Bones looked at Booth. "She would have liked me."

"She keeps everyone honest, this one," Booth noted.

"Hey, Chuck, you got a moment?" Wade asked, giving the man in the wheelchair a moment to join them before he continued. "These people are from the FBI."

"I thought Patricia drowned," Chuck asked.

"We don't know the cause of death yet," Bones clarified.

"She went for a swim on a foggy morning," Chuck said, in a firm tone that made it clear he thought he knew the situation. "She got cut in half by a yacht propeller or a destroyer returning to Norfolk, OK?"

"Chuck," Wade said.

"We don't know how the body was disarticulated," Bones corrected.

"What the hell do you know?" Chuck asked indignantly.

"We know what we don't know, Mr Kennedy," Booth countered firmly. "That's why we're asking questions."

"Yeah, we do have a few felons in our congregation- former addicts," Chuck said bitterly. "Not to mention the less serious sins- lying, vanity, sloth, greed. I myself had a meth problem; would you like to arrest me?"

"Is that a confession, Chuck?" Booth asked.

"Yeah," Chuck said. "Yeah, I'm confessing to a past. I have a past, like everybody else. I bet even you do. Of course, God absolved me of my past. How about you?"

"See you around," Booth said as Chuck rolled away in the wheelchair, leaving him with nothing to say to such a fundamentally personal question; his Shanshu might have marked his redemption for his sins as Angelus and Angel, but he hadn't exactly lived a clean life since he became Seeley Booth either.

"He's taking it hard," Wade explained. "The way Chuck sees it, Patricia introduced him to God, and God saved his life, gave him focus, made him part of a community."

"Do you have a congregant called JP?" Booth asked, deciding to tackle the only real issue left to them in this situation.

* * *

  
"Are you sure it was my father?" Ryan Stephenson asked, looking at Booth in confusion as he sat opposite the agent in the FBI interrogation room.

"Yes, I'm positive," Booth said.

"They told me Dad died in Thailand."

"Well, he, uh… well, she seemed to have found peace up there on the island," Booth said, showing Ryan a picture of Patricia outside her church.

"Named his church 'Inclusion'?" Ryan noted.

"Yeah," Booth said.

"He welcomed drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals…"

"According to her congregation, who loved her, your father welcomed everyone," Booth said, giving Ryan a moment of silence before he spoke again. "What? You afraid your father's gonna burn in hell?"

"No," Ryan said, shaking his head tearfully. "No, I just wish I had the chance to know the new him...her."

Looking up at Booth, he realised what the agent was subtly implying. "I'm a suspect? You thought perhaps I found out my father was a fraud who had a sex change and that God asked me to kill him?"

"Did God tell you to kill your dad?" Booth asked, placing a photograph of Patrick on the table.

"I've changed," Ryan said, turning the photograph over and pushing it back towards Booth. "Do you believe in redemption?"

"Yes, I do," Booth said; he might not be able to share his personal experience of it, but he could share his belief in it.

"One of God's challenges to us is to see past the surface," Ryan explained, ripping the dust-cover off his book to reveal a white-covered Bible underneath, "to the deeper, essential nature which lies right beneath."

"You believe our bodies are like dustcovers?" Booth asked.

"That's exactly what I think, Agent Booth," Ryan said. "Rip them off and see what's underneath. You see, all this time I thought my father was killed or… had abandoned me, and that's just not what happened. He didn't want to shake my faith. He was protecting me from the truth; he… he didn't want me to have to choose between him and God, and I love my father for that. I just hope God can forgive me for making him feel that way."

The two sat in silence for a moment, Booth contemplating the speech he'd just heard, before Ryan reached out to touch the white book lying on the desk. "Do you think I could have my father's Bible?"

"I'm afraid it's still evidence," Booth said. "But, hey, we figure out who killed your father, we'll make sure you get that."

"Thank you," Ryan said

"You ever consider returning to the ministry, Ryan?" Booth asked, curious despite himself; the kid's background aside, he made a very compelling case for his views, and Booth could think of worse candidates to lead a church than a sinner who'd found a path to a more peaceful God.

And… on a personal level, witnessing Ryan sitting opposite him, it was hard not to wonder if he could have made this kind of impression on Connor if his son had simply been on his own in Quor'toth rather than being raised by Holtz to hate him based on so many stories of Angelus's past…


	66. The Skull in the Sculpture

"Invoice was made out to B&B Enterprises," Booth explained as he and Bones walked to the location identified as the registration address of the car that held their latest victim. "This was the sixth car that was crushed and sent back to this address."

"Oh, so you think there might be five more bodies?" Bones asked, her voice low but apprehensive at the thought.

"Well, you know what?" Booth replied. "If this is mob-related, and we bring down the big boys, we will sell the movie rights for a fortune."

"But what if it's not the mob?" Bones asked.

"Come on," Booth smiled. "Do the math, Bones."

"Well, the math wouldn't indicate motive or identify a suspect," Bones countered. "And you haven't even provided enough variables…"

"It's a figure of speech, Bones, all right?" Booth said, as they stopped in front of a building, only to halt the anthropologist as she began to head towards the door. "Here we are- whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what goes first?"

"Gun goes first," Bones sighed in resignation.

"That's right," Booth said, as they started walking up the stairs leading to the door.

"But what if you get shot?" Bones asked.

"Don't say things like that," Booth said, gaze fixed on the door as he advanced towards it. "You're gonna jinx me, all right?"

"Well, if you're relying on superstition for safety, perhaps I should carry the gun," Bones noted.

"No, you are definitely not carrying a gun," Booth said firmly, as they halted in front of a set of glass doors and he paused to pull out his lock picks; he may have preferred to kick his way into things when pressed for time, but that didn't mean that he hadn't picked up a few tricks seeing his colleagues pick locks when the invitation rule had stopped him from making it simple. "Give me some space, all right?"

"Is this legal?" Bones asked, as Booth knelt down to pick the lock.

"Look, if anyone asks, the door was open," Booth said briefly.

"No, it isn't," Bones whispered, until a firm glare from him clarified the situation for her. After a few moments' work, he successfully opened the door, allowing both of them to enter the building and survey the broken cars inside it.

Booth didn't know what was going on here, but if this was some new mob scheme to dispose of bodies, it wasn't a very good one; nobody trying to get rid of bodies by hiding them in crushed cars would keep the cars afterwards…

* * *

  
"The artist did a series of six sculptures over the past two years," Bones noted, as she studied a video on the work of missing artist Geoffrey Thorne.

"Sculptures?" Booth repeated, looking between the crushed cars and a pamphlet he'd found on the exhibition; he knew that art had changed over the years, but at least in his day people could make an effort to create art rather than just smashing stuff that already existed. "Whoa… these things are going for hundreds of thousands of dollars."

"All cultures put a great value on art," Bones shrugged.

"Yeah, _art_ ," Booth said dismissively. "A nice bowl of fruit, uh, dogs playing poker… if I sold all the crap that was in my garage, I could retire and make a fortune."

"Geoffrey's work is a brilliant examination of consumerism and the destruction of the soul," the woman who had been identified as the dead artist's agent said as she stood beside one of the sculptures, glaring at frustration at Booth.

"I see twisted metal," Bones noted.

"Well, you need to look beneath the surface," the woman said.

"Oh, we did," Booth noted. "And we found a body, which is exactly why you're not going anywhere."

"Agent Booth?" FBI tech Marcus Grier said, walking over to stand behind the older woman. "The luminol is showing evidence of blood all over the floor."

"Of course it is," the woman said.

"Excuse me?" Booth asked.

"Kiko was here," the woman continued, as though that explained everything.

"Kiko?"

"Kiko, the performance artist," the woman elaborated. "Pig's blood is an integral and crucial part of her work."

"Is that even legal?" Bones asked.

"Well, we'll decide what's pig and what isn't," Booth said, ordering Grier to prepare some samples.

"I've already called my lawyer," the agent said.

"That's great," Booth said. "Tell him to meet you down at the FBI offices."

"Oh, I didn't call him for me," the woman laughed. "You see how much these works are worth? You are liable for any damages."

"Damage?" Booth said, unable to believe what he'd just heard; with the state these things were in, he had to wonder if anyone would notice any additional 'damage'.

"They're crushed cars," Bones said, confirming that she at least shared his views.

"They're _wrecks_ ," Booth reaffirmed.

"Fortunately, your ignorance and lack of appreciation of Geoffrey's work don't affect its value," the woman said coldly.

"OK, all right, guys," Booth called out to the room at large, deciding it was easier to humour the woman for the moment. "Careful handling the junk; apparently it's art, all right?"

"Uh, perhaps I could help?" a younger woman suddenly asked, as she walked in to look at Booth and his partner. "I'm Roxie Lyon, Geoffrey Thorne's assistant."

"Does the artist make a habit of encasing corpses within his sculptures?" Bones asked.

"Excuse me?" Roxie said in surprise.

"Well, we found one of these crushed cars and traced it back here to this address," Booth clarified, trying to make up for Bones's more abrupt description of their reason for being here.

"We've done the best we can without ripping one of these things apart," Marcus added, as he walked back over to the group.

"No accordion-dead bodies?" Booth asked.

"The cadaver dogs can identify human blood," Marcus noted. "They didn't find any."

"Oh my God," Roxie said, walking over to the other woman. "Helen?"

"Yes?" the older woman now identified as Helen said.

"Do you think Geoffrey might have actually done it?"

"No, that was all just depressed artist talk, Roxie," Helen said dismissively. "You should know that. You were a depressed artist yourself."

"Hello?" Booth interjected. "Do you want to explain this to me?"

"Uh, recently Geoffrey's been talking about finding a way to make himself part of the art," Roxie explained.

"Do you mean literally?" Bones asked.

"The ultimate artistic act," Helen said solemnly.

"Geoffrey was depressed, and he said he felt like he'd reached his limit as an artist," Roxie elaborated.

"We'd like to show you a picture of the remains, only if you're up for it," Booth said, pulling out a few of the photos they'd taken of the body; it might not be one of the more exposed corpses they'd ever dealt with, but it raised some disturbing images.

"I suggest you don't look at the person, but rather this distinct ring," Bones said, indicating one close-up of the victim's hand.

"That's Geoffrey," Helen said.

"I know that ring; I designed it myself," Roxie said, taking the photo to look at it more closely. "It's Geoffrey."

"Bravo, Geoffrey," Helen said, looking upwards as she spoke.

"You are an extremely unlikeable woman," Bones said firmly.

"Mr Thorne have any enemies?" Booth asked.

"Why?" Helen said in her familiar arrogant tone. "It's obvious he did this to himself."

"To you, perhaps, but we actually require evidence," Bones said, saving Booth from voicing his own, less polite thoughts on such a statement; in his experience, even manic-depressives just wanted to end it all in one go rather than draw it out by doing something as complicated as crushing themselves in a car (And he wasn't sure if something like that could even _be_ a one-man operation).

"Anton DeLuca," Roxie added, prompting Booth to look curiously at her. "He's an artist and a rival of Geoffrey's. They had a pretty big argument here the other night."

"About what?" Booth asked.

"What all artists argue about; money," Helen said briefly.

Booth knew he didn't have much evidence so far, but he was already disliking this woman; she was far too quick to shift from claiming that it had been depressed artist talk to being certain that the vic had done that to himself…

* * *

  
"I was Geoffrey Thorne's assistant for almost four years," Roxie said as she sat opposite Booth in the interrogation room.

" _OK_ ," Sweets said, over Booth's earpiece, watching from the other side of the observation window. " _I suggest you start with the mundane, and then work yourself up to the sexual stuff_."

"So did you have a sexual relationship with your boss?" Booth asked, deciding to cut to the chase; he appreciated Sweets' insight in past cases, but there were times when he felt like playing out his own hunches rather than relying on the psychiatrist.

" _OK, that's the total opposite of my suggestion_ ," Sweets countered.

"No," Roxie said, shaking her head vehemently at the suggestion. "No."

"So what was the nature of your relationship?" Booth asked, testing the waters even as he began to develop his own theory.

"I assisted Geoffrey," Roxie elaborated. "I handled the details of his day-to-day life… Are you sure it's Geoffrey?"

" _Prevaricate, keep her guessing_ ," Sweets suggested.

"Yes, we're positive," Booth said; he might have a theory about Roxie's real relationship with the dead artist, but he wasn't going to tell Sweets what he was planning or thought until she confirmed it herself (Maybe it was petty, but he felt like proving to Sweets that he didn't completely _need_ the guy to do a psychological assessment of their cases all the time).

" _Why am I here_?" Sweets sighed.

"As his personal assistant did you get him his drugs?" Booth continued.

"If you mean his prescriptions, then... yes, I picked them up for him and I reminded him to take them," Roxie clarified.

" _Ask her if Thorne was clinically depressed_ ," Sweets asked.

"He was depressed, right?" Booth said, deciding to acknowledge that suggestion to at least make Sweets feel not completely useless.

"Yes," Roxie said, glancing down at the papers before her. "He was… suicidal. Seeing a shrink."

"That's why you're here," Booth noted, glancing over at the window where Sweets was watching.

"Because you think Geoffrey took an overdose?" Roxie asked, misinterpreting his statement.

"If he killed himself, I mean, wouldn't he have left a suicide note?" Booth asked, attention focused back on her.

"Yeah, I would think that he would have... left me a message," Roxie confirmed.

"Look, if you weren't sleeping with Thorne, then why did he name you the sole beneficiary of his estate?" Booth asked, indicating the papers in front of them.

"Geoffrey's will?" Roxie asked.

"Yeah, it's… about one million dollars," Booth said, folding it over to a particular page and passing it to her. "Look at that."

"I had no idea that he was going to do that," Roxie said.

" _Perhaps jealousy is her motive for killing Thorne_ ," Sweets asked. " _Why else would she deny sleeping with him_?"

"I don't think so," Booth said, responding to Sweets more than Roxie.

"I swear," Roxie said, a slight edge to her voice as though she was about to start crying.

"No, there was another reason why you weren't sleeping with Thorne," Booth continued. "Isn't that right, Roxie?"

"Angela told you, didn't she?" Roxie asked, sounding like she was regaining control of herself.

"Why don't you tell me?" Booth asked, ignoring Sweets' question over the earpiece.

"I'm gay," Roxie said firmly. "I'm a lesbian. I've never been with a man in my life and I never will."

Sweets' stunned response was enough for Booth to feel better about their lack of progress with the case so far; it was good to hear proof that he could still assess someone's mental state on his own.

* * *

  
"Am I under arrest?" Angela asked, smiling at Booth as she sat beside him in the car.

"Nope; you're one of the good guys, alright?" Booth confirmed with a smile. "Look up Anton DeLuca on the FBI database."

"That's Geoffrey Thorne's big rival, huh?" Angela asked, as she pulled up a list on the car computer. "He's a forger?"

"You got to be kidding me…" Booth said, glancing at the screen. "Under the alias of Lucas Danton? I mean, this guy really loves himself."

"Yeah, two years in prison," Angela noted. "Forging Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud… he must be pretty good."

"All right, so I got a dead artist and a forger who hates him," Booth said, deciding not to comment on DeLuca's artistic ability; the fact that he'd been caught suggested that he couldn't be that good, but being able to do that work in the first place was impressive. "That's got to cheer you up. I mean, your friend is no longer our prime suspect."

"Thanks, Booth," Angela smiled at the comment.

"Any time," Booth replied casually.

"So, does it freak you out?"

"What?" Booth asked, looking at the artist in surprise.

"You know, that Roxie and I were a couple," Angela clarified.

"No," Booth said, mind already racing for an answer that would sound 'acceptable' coming from a Catholic ex-sniper. Angelus had been through more than a few sexual encounters with men during his time in control, even if Angel wasn't that way inclined when the soul was intact, but even if those had mostly just been another means for Angelus to control the situation rather than any kind of romance, Angel had lived long enough not to care what people did so long as it made them happy. "I mean, come on, you had feelings for somebody."

"I'm surprised," Angela said.

"Why, because you think I'm some kind of lunkhead cop?"

"No, I just…" Angela began.

"All right," Booth said, as another explanation came to him from Booth's memories; it wasn't something he had reason to think about much, but it should work for this conversation. "Uh… look, my Aunt Ruth had a roommate, okay? She was my favorite aunt. She and Franny, they'd take me to the ballpark, to the movies, and I heard talk, when I was a kid- beat up my friend, Pete, because of it- then, I found out it was true."

"And…?" Angela asked.

"I already said she was my favourite aunt," Booth smiled. "And Franny... well, you know, she had box seats for the Phillies games. I mean, come on, it doesn't get any better than that, right?"

"Right…" Angela smiled in confirmation.

"So you and Roxie… hey," Booth said, shrugging dismissively. "You know what I mean?"

"Yeah," Angela said, grinning gratefully at him. "So, you brought me along. What can I do to help you?"

"I want you to be an artist, OK," Booth explained. "And, uh, keep me from looking like an idiot."

"I'm not positive I can do both," Angela replied, even as the grin she gave him confirmed that he shouldn't take that comment too seriously.

* * *

  
With the case concluded, Booth was grateful for anything that would stop him thinking about the latest arrest; Helen's actions might have been wrong, but he could almost sympathise with her desperation to save her life. As a result, when he saw Cam and Hodgins standing on the balcony watching the forensics platform below them, he and Bones soon walked over to join them.

"What's going on?" Booth asked his colleagues.

"Sweets is firing Daisy for us," Hodgins answered with an anticipatory grin.

"We're wondering what his method will be," Cam continued.

"He'll explain to her logically that that this environment is not conducive for either her or us and, as a scientist, she'll realize that he's right," Bones said, as Sweets walked up onto the platform where Daisy was working.

"No, Sweets is a lot sneakier than that," Booth speculated. "He'll use some kind of psychological Jedi mind trick to make her think it was her idea to quit."

As they watched Sweets talk with Daisy on the platform, their exchange only just audible a their current distance, Booth briefly wondered what the two were discussing, noting that it was far too comfortable for a discussion that was meant to be about someone being fired, but that question was answered when Sweets suddenly leaned in and gave Daisy a particularly passionate kiss.

"I'm totally shocked," Hodgins said after a few moments.

"Yeah," Bones said awkwardly. "They should not be doing that on the forensic platform."

" _That's_ a method of termination I've never tried," Cam acknowledged. "But bravo, Doctor Sweets."

"They'll never work," Booth said, still looking at Sweets and Daisy as Cam and Hodgins walked off. "They're like complete opposites."

"I agree," Bones said. "For all her faults, she's a woman of science, Sweets bases his life on the vagaries of psychology and emotion; you know, there's no common ground."

"Right," Booth said, exaggerating his dismissive scoff as he studied the couple; right now, he was more concerned with hiding his reaction to Bones's abrupt dismissal of the idea than sharing his own feelings.

"You need common ground," Bones said. "What else is there?"

"Absolutely," Booth said, as Sweets and Daisy walked off the platform together, leaving Booth to stare silently after the other two.

He had such a long relationship history to draw on to answer that question, but right now, none of that seemed relevant in the face of his own feelings at Bones' comments.

Why did the idea that she'd react that way to the relationship they'd just seen affect _him_ so much?


	67. The Con Man in the Meth Lab

Walking into the lab to examine their latest case, Booth just wished that he felt more comfortable about the idea of introducing Jared to the rest of his team.

He might have had several years to adjust to the idea of having a brother, but even if he'd gone literally centuries as an 'only child' ever since Angelus killed Kathy, some small part of him couldn't help comparing Jared to Kathy and the living sibling always came up short; Jared might have more life experience than Kathy, but it had been so much easier to care about her without reservation…

"Camille?" Jared said, as he followed Booth onto the platform.

"Jarhead!" Cam said, looking at the source of the voice in surprise. "It's really you?"

"Jarheads are marines," Jared corrected her. "I'm a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy; not an acceptable mistake."

"He's getting so big," Cam grinned, as she looked between Jared and Booth. "Soon he'll be wanting a later curfew and a car of his own."

"Jared," Booth said, quickly noting that the current squintern was just Clark- who therefore wouldn't be that interested in talking- before he made his introductions, "this here is my partner Doctor Temperance Brennan, that back there is a squint. Bones, this is my little brother."

"Bones-" Jared began.

"Doctor Brennan," Booth corrected; only he got to call Bones by that nickname.

"Ah, it is nice to meet you, Jarhead," Bones said, smiling as she shook his brother's hand. "I can see the family resemblance; your facial structure is even more symmetrical than Booth's."

"Is she coming on to me?" Jared asked.

"No, it's just the way she talks," Booth corrected firmly.

"Right," Jared said.

"So, the Pentagon, huh?" Cam asked.

"You're looking at the new head of Strategic Plans and Policy," Jared smiled.

"He basically runs the place," Booth said with a grin; he might have trouble with Jared's attitude at times, but he had to admire what his brother had accomplished. "So, uh, Cam, Jared has a favour he'd like to ask."

"I can ask my own favours, Seeley," Jared said.

"OK, go ahead," Booth noted.

"There's a cocktail party tonight," Jared explained. "I'm in need of a beautiful woman on my arm, preferably a very smart one."

"I'm quite intelligent," Bones noted.

"No," Booth said automatically. "Not that you're not intelligent- I mean you are intelligent-"

"I would be delighted," Cam said, saving him from making that particular discussion any more awkward.

"I've got a hit on the patent application, filed by somebody named Paul Stegman," Angela said, walking up to the platform with some papers before she registered Jared's presence. "I've got an address there… whoa, there's more than one Booth. I'm Angela. Montenegro."

"Jared Booth," Jared smiled.

"Hi," Angela said as she shook his hand.

"OK, uh, Jared," Booth interjected. "Bones and I have to work on a case, so…"

"Yeah, no problem," Jared said. "I will, uh, grab a cab and get settled into my new place. It was very nice to meet you all, and Cam, I will pick you up at your place, say seven."

"Sounds good," Cam said.

"Alright," Jared said, as he left the platform.

"Are you thinking of leaving lesbianism behind?" Bones asked.

"I prefer not to be labelled, OK," Angela clarified.

"Well, since you were last here Angela ran into her ex-girlfriend, who is now her _ex_ -ex-girlfriend," Booth noted to Clark; no matter how much the guy tried to avoid the social aspects of the work, that kind of comment deserved some explanation in his view.

"Well, the only ex I care about are X-rays," Clark said after a moment's assessment.

"Right," Booth said.

"Apologise for the pun," Clark said, before he left the platform himself.

"Yeah, don't give up your day job, kid," Booth noted before he turned to his partner; he had more important things to worry about than the squintern's lack of interest in their social lives. "OK, Bones, what say we go and solve a murder, huh? Come on."

* * *

  
" _I found a match for our victim's DNA on the felony database_ ," Cam said over the speakerphone, as Booth sat in his desk going over the paperwork.

"Have you seen Bones this morning?" he asked.

" _No_ ," Cam replied. " _I think she and Jared had a late night. Open the attachment I just sent you_."

"Kay," Booth said, as he opened the e-mail in question, grateful for the chance to think about something other than the possibility of Bones and his brother doing… _that_ … as he studied the presented photograph. "Anthony Pongetti, multiple fraud convictions."

" _That's our victim_ ," Cam confirmed.

"Right," Booth said, chin on his hand as he considered the new information. "So, Pongetti pretends to be Stegman. Why?"

" _Reads that article on the inventor and figures there's something to cash in on_?" Cam suggested.

"You know, Bones never gets in this late," Booth said, unable to stop that thought buzzing through his mind.

" _You're the one who said you didn't mind them going out together_ ," Cam pointed out.

"Bye," Booth said, hanging up the phone before he could get into that issue in any further detail.

Being jealous of Spike's relationship with Buffy had been somewhat petty, but it had at least been justified; what they had shared hadn't been healthy for either party from what he'd heard, and that was before he factored in that it had started when Spike was soulless and thus fundamentally psychologically incapable of that kind of affection (He'd cared more for things than a standard vampire, but it was still in a very weird way).

Bones and Jared… there was no real _reason_ for him to have issues with it…

"Special Agent Booth?" a voice said from the door, prompting the agent to look up and take in the dark-skinned man in a grey uniform with various medals on it.

"Well, look at that," Booth said, "a full Colonel from the State Police."

"Ryan Wolchuck," the other man introduced himself as they shook hands.

"How are you?" Booth asked.

"Mind if I sit?" Wolchuck answered.

"No, please, have a seat," Booth confirmed. "You know, if this is about the RICO investigation I've been keeping you guys in the loop just like I promised."

"Well, I'm here about the meth lab body," Wolchuck responded.

"OK," Booth said.

"It's extremely embarrassing for the State Police that this homicide victim was blown up during a training exercise," the colonel explained, Booth nodding briefly in acknowledgement before the other man continued. "And the Superintendent, the Governor, various movers and shakers, would look kindly on it if you… well, if you simply neglected to give that small detail to the press."

"And if the press digs up that the bodies were burned and blown into several pieces it makes the FBI look sneaky," Booth noted.

"Well, the FBI is sneaky," Wolchuck said, prompting a brief laugh from them both before Booth stood up.

"Right," he said firmly. "Not today, sir."

"Careers are made when men of good intent help each other," Wolchuck said, even as he followed Booth's example and stood up himself.

"I'll tell you what," Booth countered. "Why don't we just tell the truth and take our lumps when we have to?"

Maybe it was a little petty, but he wasn't in the mood for another bureaucratic cover-up on top of everything else in his life right now, and at least _this_ was something he could deal with…

* * *

  
Taking in the sight of Jared's crashed car up against the lamppost as he pulled up to the location that his brother had identified in his message, Booth was once again reminded of his earlier reflections about the difference between Kathy and Jared. His little sister might have lived and died long before cars even existed, but he doubted she would have ever done something like this even if she had the opportunity to do so.

"You all right?" he asked, focusing on his brother's well-being rather than his own frustration at the situation.

"Yeah, yeah Seeley," Jared replied. "I fell asleep at the wheel, but I'm OK."

"Yeah," Booth said after a moment's harsh staring at his brother. "'Fell asleep'."

"Local trooper here says he knows you," Jared added, indicating Colonel Wolchuck as he walked up to the crash.

"Agent Booth," the other man said.

"Colonel Wolchuck," Booth replied, cursing his poor luck; this might have been workable with some random state trooper, but with someone this senior who already had a potential grudge against him, it wasn't going to be easy. "Is that what we're going with here, he fell asleep at the wheel?"

"I'm sure you'll agree it's best just to tell the truth, take our lumps when we have to," Wolchuck replied.

"They get me for DUI, I lose my job Seeley," Jared put in from behind him. "I mean, I lose my whole career-"

"Shut up," Booth glared at his brother. "Shut up, please."

He knew what he had to do, even if it meant losing face with this guy and credit for that case, but there were times when he truly hated his sense of responsibility...

* * *

  
"Do you think he did it?" Bones asked, studying Steve Jackson as he sat in the interrogation room before Booth came back to join her.

"No, we'll check his whereabouts but, you know, I don't think so," Booth said; he might not always get technology, but he liked to think he knew enough to know that those electronic tags were generally fairly reliable, and this guy clearly didn't have the skill or resources to change his tag. "Nice hat huh? Come on I'll take you back to the lab."

"What happened with your RICO bust?" Bones asked, going exactly where Booth had been hoping to avoid.

"Nothing," he said. "Why? You been talking to Cam?"

"No," Bones said. "Did you do something wrong?"

"What d'you mean?" Booth asked.

"Well, you didn't get the credit you deserved," Bones said. "What did you do?"

"Life is not always about credit," Booth said, hoping that answer would suffice without him needing to say anything else that would just make him sound petty

"Well, that's not what you said before," Bones continued. "You said life was all about credit and you were going to Hawaii and they were going to put you on a coin."

"Uh… you know what, let's just forget about it," Booth said, suddenly embarrassed at his elaborate exaggerations of how big the case could have been; he guessed that he was too used to enjoying the public acclaim he got for his work these days, as opposed to his 'need' to stay secret as Angel. "OK, Bones, forget about it."

"Jared warned me that you tend to sabotage yourself," Bones said, cutting Booth off before he could leave the room.

"Jared said that?" he said, turning sharply back to look at his partner.

"He said that you were afraid of success," Bones continued.

"So I'm basically a loser," Booth said, unable to believe that Jared would actually say something like that; he spent most of his time bailing Jared out of trouble, and his brother had the _nerve_ to say that _he_ was the screw-up?

"No, he never said the word loser," Bones corrected.

"Do you think I'm a loser, like that guy in there?" Booth continued, indicating Jackson; Buffy might have spent time working for that Double Meat Palace place back in Sunnydale, but she'd been dealing with a lot of other crap at the time that at least excused the bad career move. "Some clown in some dumb-ass uniform who basically can't do any better? Is that what you think?"

"Well, anthropologically, males tend to rank themselves into a hierarchy," Bones continued. "There's no shame in not being at the top of the hierarchy-"

"You're not answering the question, Bones," Booth said firmly. "Answer my question."

The conversation was interrupted when the cellphone rang, which Booth was frankly grateful for; on some level, he wasn't sure he _wanted_ to know what kind of answer his partner would have come up with…

* * *

  
As the team sat around the Founding Fathers after their latest case concluded, Booth tried to resist the thought that this case hadn't been one of their best; he'd been through the emotional ringer, he'd had to kill the suspect when he tried to escape, and Bones had been injured during the apprehension, and was still wearing a sling over her right arm.

On top of Jared's crap, this was far and away the worst case he'd had to deal with for a while…

"I would like to propose a toast," Bones said, addressing the rest of the bar, "to my partner, Seeley Booth."

"To Booth," the rest of the squints said, raising their own glasses in the same toast.

"I know who he is, but I forget sometimes, because…" Bones continued, pausing reflectively before she continued, "because he never shines a light on himself. He shines it on other people."

"Yeah, right after I conked them on the head with it," Booth said, prompting some quiet chuckles from his team as he took a sip of his drink.

"Anthropology teaches us that, the alpha male is the man wearing the crown, displaying the most colorful plumage and the shiniest baubles, he stands out from the others," Bones continued, before she turned to face him directly. "But I now think that anthropology may have it wrong. In working with Booth, I have come to realize that the quiet man, the invisible man, the man who is always there for friends and family… that's the real alpha male. And I promise, that my eyes will never be caught by those… shiny baubles again. Happy birthday."

"Thanks, Bones," Booth said, as the rest of the team raised their glasses to join Bones in her congratulations.

It was a small thing, but the fact that everything she'd said about him as a person could apply to Booth or Angel…

His train of thought was interrupted when he was pulled to his feet by his partner before he could take more than a moment to savour the feeling. "Uh, Bones, alright; what are we doing?"

"Come here," Bones said.

"What?" Booth asked, confused.

"Just come here for a second," Bones said, pulling him to a quieter area further along the bar. "What you're doing for your brother isn't fair."

"Come on, Bones, don't get me mad at you, after that great speech, right?" Booth asked. "Not after I got you shot…"

"You didn't get me shot; I got me shot," Bones corrected.

"I don't wanna talk about my brother," Booth said, sitting down at the bar.

"Would you prefer Sweets do it?" Bones asked, indicating the psychiatrist sitting further along the bar as he raised his glass at them.

"I'm listening," Booth said, curious at what Sweets could have said to have this kind of impact on Bones.

"Well," Bones said, "I I forgot all the psychological stuff but basically, when you… rescue somebody all the time, if you keep getting them out on bail…"

"Bail them out, Bones," Booth corrected. "If you bail them out."

"You're thwarting their ability to help themselves," Bones continued. "Now you're angry."

"Come on, Bones," Booth said, trying not to remind himself too much of Doyle's observations during that mess with Melissa and Doctor Meltzer, "you have to admit, getting a psychological lesson from you is like…"

"Getting an anthropology lesson from you," Bones noted.

"The RICO case," Booth said, feeling that he had to say something. "I traded my one shot at glory to keep my brother from being arrested… for drunk driving."

"Booth!" Bones said, looking sympathetically at him. "You know, what if he does it again? What if he kills someone next time? You shouldn't have done that."

"Right," Booth said, sighing in frustration. "Says the woman who got her father off murder charges… Face it, we do things for family."

"You're right," Bones nodded. "You're totally right."

Booth felt like scum as soon as he'd made that analogy; he'd been thinking of Kathy when he made that statement, but this was _far_ from what he would have done for her.

Kathy might have grown up in a different time and place from Jared, but he was certain that she would never have given him this kind of trouble if she was still alive in this time.

"No," he said grimly, as he looked over at Jared sitting at the other end of the bar. "I'm not."

"What?" Bones asked. "Why?"

"There's no risk that your father will kill again," Booth said, standing up and walking over to his brother, expression firm as he led his younger sibling out to the front of the bar.

"You, uh, bringing me out here to give me advice on your partner?" Jared asked with a smile. "Because I think that ship has sailed."

"Well, no," Booth said, resisting the urge to express his anger at the idea that Jared thought he could ever have been good enough for her. "It's, uh, what I gotta do… I, uh, I gotta stop. Do you understand?"

"Stop?" Jared repeated.

"Yeah, and you should stop too," Booth continued, hoping his brother could just get the point without needing to say it.

"I gotta stop what?" Jared asked.

"The drinking," Booth said firmly. "Stop it."

"I'll take that under advisement," Jared said, turning back to the bar.

"I'm serious Jared," Booth corrected. "No more stepping in to make things go away."

"I carry my own water, Seeley," Jared said, glaring at him in anger; clearly, like anyone who was flawed, he resented someone else drawing attention to them. "Now you should go back inside and enjoy your birthday party."

"Right," Booth said, as Jared drained his drink, waving the glass in Booth's face before turning around to go back into the bar.

He had no idea if what he'd just done had actually accomplished anything; Jared had taken in the statement, but the question was if he'd take it seriously enough to actually do anything about it before Booth had to make a choice on whether or not to step in next time.

God, why couldn't whatever powers had created his life as Seeley Booth brought Kathy back to life in the process? She would have been so much easier to care for than Jared was being right now…

 _Damnit_ … he failed Kathy when he became a vampire, and now he was risking failing Jared when he was human.

Maybe he just wasn't meant to be a brother or a father; Parker had only come through everything so far because he didn't spend much time with the kid…


	68. The Passenger in the Oven

Even if flying was easier as Booth than it ever had been as Angel now that he no longer had to worry about ensuring night-time flights at both ends, it was still far from Booth's favourite method of travel, trapped for hours besides strangers with either nothing to talk about or attempts to make awkward conversation that never felt entirely comfortable to him…

His initial attempt to 'hide' in first class might not have worked, but after he had satisfied himself that the current seating conditions just weren't doing it for him, he got up and left the row, ignoring the old woman's comment that he should get his prostate checked in favour of avoiding the flight attendants as he headed for the first-class area of the plane. Slipping past the flight attendant, it didn't take long to find his partner as she reclined in her seat, clearly taking advantage of the luxuries offered by her current situation, prompting him to grab a bottle before he sat down beside her.

"Bones," he whispered, noting that even his partner's eye-mask seemed to be more elaborate than the one he had been provided with back in coach. "Bones."

"You're going to get in trouble," Bones noted as she removed the eye mask and headphones to look at him.

"She's downstairs," Booth said firmly; he refused to leave this seat until he'd gotten an answer to the biggest question troubling him right now. "You didn't answer me before. You tired of working with me?"

"No, it's not that," Bones said as she sat up, looking reassuringly at him. "But the identification and analysis of ancient remains… that's why I became a forensic anthropologist."

"You're bored," Booth concluded grimly. "Spark is gone."

"I'm a scientist first," Bones said firmly.

"Right," Booth said, not wanting to voice his thoughts on that assessment as he sat down and pulled on an eye-mask. "Yeah, scientist first; I get it, I understand…"

What had happened to the woman who had all-but-confirmed that she became an anthropologist to give people the answers she had been denied? Even if she wasn't willing to acknowledge that idea herself, that didn't change the fact that he'd seen that there was so much more to her than the scientist she was trying to be right now…

"Hey," Bones asked, smiling at him as he put his sleeping mask back on. "If you get caught up here, does that make me an accessory?"

"An accessory to an upgrade," Booth countered, as he pulled down his mask and reclined in his seat, whistling at the sensation as the seat began to vibrate. "Oh yeah, this is heaven…"

In hindsight, he almost should have expected the subsequent scream from below them; sometimes, it seemed like he never could get a break without something happening to ruin the mood before he really got the chance to enjoy it.

* * *

  
As cases went, Booth hated to admit it, but he actually found it fascinating to see Bones so outside of her usual environment. After so long seeing Bones draw all kinds of conclusions from all sorts of advanced technological devices, it was intriguing to see how she coped when all she had to rely on was her natural intellect and whatever she could adapt from what was available.

Of course, having to face a drunk teenager to get some of that equipment wasn't a fun experience by any definition- apart from the legality, it just brought up too many memories of the way he'd been back when he'd been alive and realised that he could never satisfy his father's expectations- but at least it looked like this kid had a slightly better excuse for his actions than he'd had.

"Come on," he said, staring firmly at the boy.

"What?" the kid countered, as he slouched back in his chair.

"OK," Booth said; he didn't have time to give this kid a lecture, so he'd focus on getting what he needed and would worry about the wider issues of this mess later.

"Hand it over. Hand the vodka over. Come on."

With nothing else he could say to that kind of certainly, the boy took out two small bottles from his pocket and handed them to Booth.

"Thought so," Booth said, glancing at the kid's mother further down the seats before leaning over to address the boy more directly; even if he couldn't give the kid a full lecture, he should give him something to think about. "Look, obviously your mom is sick, and you love her, and that's probably why you're acting badly. But what you've got to do, is you've got to think, really think, how to help her."

"She's gonna die, OK?" the boy said, his tone low and painful as he looked back at Booth. "What am I supposed to do about that?"

The circumstances might be different, but Angel was suddenly reminded of his attempts to save Darla during the brief restoration of her humanity; it was far from the same circumstances, considering that Darla wasn't actually his mother and he'd already made a certain peace with his history with her, but the idea of someone having trouble with the loss of an important figure still had an impact on him.

"Make her proud of you," Booth said firmly, as the satellite phone beeped in his pocket, prompting him to stand up to take the message.

Maybe he wouldn't be able to make much of an impact on the kid's behaviour, but he lost nothing by trying to make a point.

Besides, considering how badly he'd been affected by his failure to save Darla- who had been a kind of mother to him, even if he'd never thought of their relationship that way- he could sympathise with the kid feeling like crap right now in a similar situation…

* * *

  
As methods of identifying suspects went, Booth wasn't sure if he should be impressed or disturbed at some of the stuff that Bones had come up with during this flight. Performing any kind of autopsy in this kind of situation had been an interesting challenge, and he'd admired her ability to get a diagnosis without any of her usual equipment, but when the plan to find blood-spatter consisted of shining a tinted light and looking through tinted glasses, he had to wonder if they were going to get anything done at this rate.

Honestly, the next time he went flying, he was going to try and get some portable versions of their gear packed; it seemed like cops could never go anywhere without finding crimes of some sort…

"Booth?" Bones suddenly said, looking at the seat where Eli had been sitting earlier.

"You got something?" Booth asked, shining the lamp in the indicated direction.

"Yes, there," Bones confirmed, pointing at the socks sticking out from under the blanket that now covered the seat.

"You're sure?" Booth asked; considering how far they were from her usual comfort zone, he had to be sure of what they were dealing with.

"Yes, Booth," Bones confirmed.

"Turn the lights on," Booth told the steward who'd been alongside them as he pulled the blanket off, revealing the kid he'd been talking to earlier.

 _Damnit_ … another case where he sympathised with the fundamental motive even if he completely disagreed with the chosen methods; at least with demons, he didn't often have to worry about sympathising with their policies.

"What is going on?" the boy's father demanded, getting up from his chair to look at Bones.

"Your son killed Elizabeth Jones," Bones said firmly.

"OK, how long 'til we land?" Booth asked, suddenly remembering Caroline's earlier warning; if this plane landed before they could establish grounds for arrest, he would technically be outside of his jurisdiction.

"Uh, we're on our final descent," the steward said.

"Eli?" the boy's father protested. "That's impossible."

"Oh, why?" Booth asked, as he quickly dialled the plane phone. "You can't think of a motive like maybe, he loves his mother? Huh? He wants to keep his family together? You probably just think he's some dumb-ass kid."

" _I beg your pardon_?" Caroline said from the other end of the line.

"Hey," Booth said, hoping that the lawyer would understand his lack of apology. "I'm- listen, Caroline, I'm ready to make an arrest."

" _You're more than sure, right, Cherie_?" Caroline asked. " _You're damn sure_?"

"Well, it's circumstantial, but it's, uh, compelling," Booth had to admit; a probable motive and odd stains on socks were far from the best case he'd ever brought to court, but he had faith that everything held up. "So do you have a warrant to sign?"

" _Yes_."

"Well, sign it so I can make the arrest-"

"Just a minute, please," the boy's father cut in.

" _That's the lawyer, right_?" Caroline noted with a dismissive sigh. " _You can always tell a damn lawyer_."

"I represent my son, who is also a minor, incidentally," Bilbrey said firmly.

" _Minor_?" Caroline repeated.

"A minor murderer!" Bones cut in, as the pilot suddenly announced that the plane was beginning its descent into Shanghai.

" _Booth, you're cutting it pretty close there_ ," Cam's voice cut in on the phone.

"Yeah, I know," Booth in frustration.

"What's going on?" Eli asked, looking blearily up from his seat.

"We know you killed Elizabeth Jones," Bones noted.

"Probably why you wanted to get so drunk, huh, Eli?" Booth put in.

"Don't say a word, Eli, not a word," his father said, before turning to face Booth directly. "You're making this arrest on the strength of blood stains on the bottom of a slipper that could belong to anyone in first class."

" _Booth_ ," Caroline said.

"OK, motive," Booth said; sparing peoples' feelings would have to wait until he'd managed to get a legitimate arrest. "The father was cheating on the dying wife with the victim?"

"Arthur?" Eli's ill mother put in, looking shakily at her husband.

"You thought the family was safe by getting away from the woman," Booth continued as he glared at the man, ignoring Bones' observation about their distance from the ground; he didn't need to _know_ how much 'trouble' they were in to get the job done. "She shows up on the plane, in first class-"

"Not a word, Eli," his father said with a low glare.

"Booth, I can see people, we have less than thirty seconds," Bones put in

" _Booth_!" Caroline yelled.

"Caroline, you gotta trust me on this," Booth insisted.

" _Make the case, Agent Booth; something more than motive_ ," Caroline protested.

"Bones…" Booth said, as his partner suddenly grabbed a case away from Eli.

"Booth," Bones said, opening the case to reveal a collection of small computer games in a transport case, "if this missing video game turns out to be the computer chip imbedded in the victim's sternum…"

Grabbing the games console from Eli's hand, a quick glance was all Booth needed to confirm that the card slot was empty; it was a small additional clue, but it was more than he'd had.

"Where'd you lose the cartridge, Eli?" he asked, before turning back to the phone call after the boy just looked apprehensively at him without replying. "We got forensic corroboration!"

"'If'," the father protested. "She said 'if'!"

" _Just sign it_!" Cam insisted to Caroline at the other end of the phone.

"The moment this plane touches down, I lose jurisdiction!" Booth reminded Caroline.

" _This better be a good_ -" Caroline began, before Booth heard Cam saying something off to the side, followed by a moment's silence. " _OK, make the arrest_."

"Eli Bilbrey," Booth said, speaking as rapidly as possible while still making every word clear, "I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Elizabeth Jones, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law because this is the United States of America!"

Almost as soon as the last word was out of his mouth, the plane touched down on the tarmac, leaving Booth signing in relief at his closest call at making a successful arrest to date.

It wasn't exactly conventional, but he'd done the job…

* * *

  
"Look what I found, huh?" Booth said, grinning as he walked back into the first class compartment, handing his partner one of the glasses of champagne he'd found in the plane's 'kitchen'. "There's that smile."

"Thank you," Bones said as she accepted the glass. "We don't even need to get off the plane?"

"No," Booth confirmed. "They're refuelling, and finding us another pilot, and… go back home."

After the two of them had taken a sip of their glasses, Brennan glanced back at the coach compartment, where Eli was currently sitting handcuffed to his seat.

"What about his parents?"

"They gotta fly back on their own dime," Booth said grimly. "Eli's in federal custody now."

Bones simply sat in thoughtful silence as she stared at her glass, reminding Booth of her thoughts about her role in their cases.

"You want to get off the plane, to see those Chinese bones," he noted. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," Bones said.

"Yeah, it is," Booth admitted. "Because I'm the one that dragged you out of pure science and pulled you into murder solving."

"That's not how I remember it," Bones said.

"Really?" Booth asked.

"Yes," Bones confirmed. "As I recall, I had to force you to take me into the field."

"Really?" Booth countered, smiling despite his recollection of their first real case together; it had been a difficult time for many reasons, but it was reassuring to hear confirmation that she hadn't forgotten what originally brought them together…

"Yes," Bones said. "You didn't want to, remember? This is all my fault."

"Hey, are you two gonna make out?" Eli called over from the back seat.

"Hey, quiet," Booth glared. "You lost your right to talk."

"Why do people always think we're going to make out?" Bones asked in a low voice.

"I say we let him sit back there the entire trip back, by himself," Booth said.

"He did kill someone," Bones agreed. "And he ruined my dig. Plus, you know he's gonna try to drink all the champagne."

"We're going to need some for later," Booth said, as he clinked glasses with his partner with a satisfied grin, glad to have the old dynamic restored once again. "To us."

For the next few hours, he wanted to focus on nothing more than enjoying the relaxing atmosphere and comfortable chairs… even if his chair didn't go _all_ the way back…


	69. The Bone That Blew

"Hey," a familiar-but-unexpected voice said to Booth as he walked towards the examination platform. "Good afternoon, Agent Booth."

"Max?" Booth said, staring at his partner's father in surprise at the sight of Max Keenan wearing a blue Jeffersonian lab coat with the building's logo on the upper pocket.

"Wish I could stay and chat, but I gotta go pick up my new employment ID," Max said, patting Booth on the shoulder before checking his bicep. "Ooh, guns of steel!"

"You work here now?" Booth called after Max in surprise, lost for anything better he could say to that revelation before he headed on up to the main examination platform where Cam and Bones were examining an apparent burn victim based on what he overheard. "Your dad works here now?"

"Not my idea," Bones said firmly.

"She wants me to fire him," Cam added.

"Why?" Booth said, unable to believe his partner's rejection.

"This is a crime lab!" Bones protested. "My father is a bank robber and an accused murderer."

"Booth's killed more people than Max has, and he works here," Cam countered.

"Don't bring that up," Booth said; even if Cam couldn't know how accurate it was, he really didn't like being reminded of his old body-count. "Why'd you have to bring that up?"

"In fact, Dr. Brennan, you've also killed a person," Cam continued. "And, I'll point out, Max was never convicted. So, in the eyes of the law, he's never killed anyone."

"Why are you defending him?" Bones asked.

"Why aren't you?" Cam countered.

"He is your father," Booth noted.

"Whose sperm hit whose egg shouldn't determine who works here," Bones said firmly.

"Come on, he's showing kids around the museum; what can it hurt?" Cam asked.

"Let's get to work, please," Bones said, turning her attention back to the victim on the morgue table in front of them, leaving Cam and Booth with nothing more to do than wait for her to tell them what she'd found.

The discovery that the victim was a former member of the armed forces might have been depressing given his own history in that area- it might be 'fictional', but most of the memories still _felt_ real enough- but at least that gave him something new he could work with to find their latest victim.

* * *

  
"The landlord said that Cal Warren worked crazy hours, you know, he kept to himself," Booth noted, as he and Bones searched through Cal Warren's relatively empty apartment. "Every time the landlord asked, you know, what he did for a living, he dodged the question."

"Maybe he liked his privacy," Bones noted as she put a few boxes back in the cupboard.

"What; so much that he pays his rent in cash?" Booth asked; he might have tried to avoid that kind of situation himself, but at least he'd had the reason that, as a vampire, he didn't really have a legal existence himself. "I don't know, Bones, something is weird, It's not right."

"There's no letters," Bones said as she moved over to a desk. "No photographs, not even… a bill."

"So did you persuade Cam to fire Max?" Booth asked.

"What, you think my dad should be allowed to work at the Jeffersonian?" Bones responded as she opened the desk's small drawers.

"What?" Booth said. "You know, she's just, you know, trying to do you a favor."

"Well, I didn't ask for a favour," Bones countered.

"Sometimes you don't need to ask," Booth said, picking up a passport from the chest of drawers and glancing through it. "Got a passport… this guy's been to countries I haven't even heard of."

"What is this?" Bones asked, picking a small card out of a jacket on a coat rack.

"I don't know…" Booth said, as he opened a drawer and found something more straightforward. "This is something we're familiar with. Foreign currency. Lots of it."

He still didn't know why Cal Warren had been murdered, but there was definitely some interesting questions being raised here…

* * *

  
"Twenty-eight grand a year?" Booth said, staring incredulously at the application form he'd been provided for the Woodbury School as his partner studied it. "I didn't pay that much for four years of college!"

"If you think it's so ridiculous, why did you save the application?" Bones asked.

"I didn't save it; I just didn't have a chance to throw it out yet," Booth corrected, taking the form out of his partner's hands and tossing it into the back seat.

"You don't have to be embarrassed," Bones noted. "It's perfectly normal to want the best for Parker."

"Public school was good enough for me, it's good enough for my kid," Booth said resolutely (The fact that he'd technically never been to public school didn't matter here; most of his friends as Angel had been through that experience, and Wesley had actually been 'hurt' more by his experience in private education than any of the others had experienced).

"Of course it is," Bones said. "Probably"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Booth asked.

"Parker is a bright, engaged little boy," Bones said defensively. "I'm sure he'll do fine in a large classroom; I did."

"Except…" Booth began.

"Except what?" Bones asked.

"Your dad was a science teacher," Booth noted (It might have been something Max adopted as a cover, but he was at least legitimately qualified). "You're a scientist."

"Yes, my education was enriched at home," Bones confirmed.

"That's what I've gotta do!" Booth said firmly. "Enrich Parker at home!"

"In what academics are you qualified to offer enrichment?" Bones asked.

Booth had no answer that would allow him to continue the 'lies' he'd created about his past as Booth; he wouldn't have an expert opinion on history as Booth, Parker was too small to use anything Booth might have to teach him about hand-to-hand combat, and Seeley Booth definitely wouldn't know anything about art.

Sometimes, he wished that he'd been able to provide more input when the Powers were creating Seeley Booth's background rather than needing to hide so much of his real skills and experience…

* * *

  
"The Royce boy was stitched up by the same doctor who said she didn't know Cal Warren," Bones mused, as she flicked through the application form he still hadn't disposed of.

"I'm having her brought in for questioning," Booth acknowledged, taking a moment before he decided to ask the question that had been troubling him for a while. "You think those kids are better off than Parker?"

"Yeah, of course they are," Bones confirmed. "They have every advantage: a wonderful school, a successful father, mother committed to charity work…"

"I spend more time with my houseplants than they do with their kids," Booth countered, suddenly reminded of what he'd heard about Cordelia and Willow's parents when they were kids; their daughters might have turned out all right in the end, but they'd still been relatively starved of true emotional support.

"Well, children of privilege have always been raised by staff; it's how the upper one percent stays the upper one percent," Bones explained. "Assuming quality education and adequate supervision, parents are actually rather irrelevant beyond a certain age."

"You're kidding me," Booth said, unable to believe his partner's statement after so much of her life had been defined by the loss of _her_ parents.

"Look at this," Bones mused. "They start Latin in third grade; that's fantastic!"

"No," Booth said firmly. "You know what's more important than academic enrichment? A loving environment. You ask anyone."

"Parker is a wonderful child, Booth," Bones said, clearly shifting the subject. "You shouldn't feel inadequate."

"Yeah, well I'm perfectly capable of raising my own kid," Booth agreed.

"You're being defensive," Bones noted.

"I am not," Booth retorted.

"It's because you only have one child," Bones continued. "When you procreate in multiples, there's less pressure."

"Thank you," Booth said in exasperation. "I feel much better."

* * *

  
"How's it goin', Max?" Booth asked, looking up from his seat as Max approached him in the Jeffersonian lounge area.

"That's the last day with my kids this afternoon," Max sighed dejectedly. "I'm toast."

"Cam fired you, huh?" Booth asked.

"No, no, Tempe fired me," Max corrected. "And don't tell me she hasn't got the authority, because, believe me... I feel fired."

"Sorry, Max," Booth said, lost for anything he could say in that situation.

"Can I ask you a question?" Max asked, getting a soda from the fridge just as Booth turned to leave.

"Sure," Booth said as he turned back.

"You, are you, uh…" Max began. "Are you sleeping with my daughter?"

"No," Booth said, wondering what had prompted this question.

"Why?" Max asked. "Are you gay?"

"No," Booth said, amused at the question despite himself; Angelus had taken that route once or twice, but it had always been more about power or control than any actual interest in that kind of thing.

"Is she not attractive enough?" Max asked.

"Bones is beautiful," Booth said firmly; he might consider himself her friend, but he wasn't blind.

"Is it because of me?" the former thief continued. "Because I killed one man, and we both know he deserved it."

"Right, just cut it out, Max, alright?" Booth protested; considering his own history, he wasn't going to reject Bones because her father had killed a few people for much better reasons than he had for his own past sins. "I'll talk to her. Probably ain't gonna get anywhere with her, but... I'll talk to her."

"You're a good man," Max said, looking reassuringly at him. "And I want that for her. And now I got to go blow up some soda for some kids."

He might not have an official relationship with his partner in that sense, but he felt strangely pleased to have that kind of validation that a relationship between them had her parent's approval.

As much as he'd cared about Cordelia and Buffy, he'd never even seen Cordy's father, and Hank was virtually a non-entity in Buffy's life before his relationship with her became serious enough for that to be factor; Giles had been a father equivalent, but it still wasn't entirely the same thing.

Knowing that a biological parent approved of the possibility of him having a relationship with their daughter…

He wasn't planning to actually get involved with Doctor Temperance Brennan any time soon, but the discovery was somewhat touching, in its way.

* * *

  
Looking down at the lab as Max demonstrated some kind of experiment to Parker, Bones watching from the upper levels, Booth tried not to acknowledge how… nice… the current scenario was; after his own father had never had such an opportunity, seeing Max with Parker was almost like seeing his son with his grandfather (And he was just amused at the thought of the Master trying to act 'nice' like Max; he was _not_ thinking about the possibility of Max becoming a 'legal' grandparent…)

"So," he said, looking at his partner as he walked up to join her. "Mom copped to conspiracy to avoid trial. She'll spend some time in prison."

"How much?" Bones asked.

"Not enough," Booth said, recalling his partner's earlier comment about raising children without consequences. "My opinion, she ruined that little girl's life."

"What about the little girl?" Bones sighed.

"Removed from the family, institutionalized for a couple of years," Booth said grimly; it wasn't exactly a slap on the wrist, but it still felt like they were basically skimming over the fact that the girl had killed someone just because of her parents.

"Then it's back to ponies and tennis lessons?" Bones asked, Booth only able to mmm in acknowledgement. "Well, Caroline should charge her as an adult."

"She's eleven years old, Bones," Booth said; he might not agree with the charge, but the girl was still not entirely emotionally mature enough to have responded to the situation in a more 'appropriate' manner, even if her reaction had been flawed on so many levels.

"Yeah, well, she's old enough to speak Chinese."

"They don't take that into account," Booth said, lost for anything better to say as he stared out at the lab. "Tell ya, when that little girl killed Cal Warren, she killed the best father she had."

"Well, sometimes it's hard to appreciate what you've got," Bones said, staring down at Max as he helped Parker put candy mints in a tube suspended in the soda bottle.

"Look at him!" Booth smiled. "Parker's never liked science before."

"So, are you still thinking of sending him to Woodbury?" Bones inquired.

"I torched the application," Booth said firmly. "I'm thinkin' there's something to be said for middle class. You sure he's gonna be all right?"

"Sure!" Bones nodded. "Well, probably."

"Probably?" Booth repeated. "Like, what do you mean, probably? What the hell are they doing anyways?"

"Disrupting the surface tension of a two-liter cola," Bones answered.

"Right," Booth said, wishing not for the first time that he'd had more opportunities to ask Willow or Fred about science when he was Angel as Max told Parker to take a step back.

"Don't fire Max," he said, deciding to address something he could understand; he might not get what they were doing, but he had faith that Max wouldn't do anything to put his son in danger. "Let him keep his job. You know, he's a teacher, he's not a janitor."

"I can't overlook the sanctity of the forensic lab, Booth…" Bones began.

"Yeah, well, maybe you can overlook it for me," Booth suggested.

"For you?"

"Yeah," Booth clarified. "Personal favour."

"What, like a partner thing?"

"Partner thing."

"I know you, Booth," Bones said, smiling at the explanation. "You're trying to do me a favor by telling me it's a favor for you."

"No," Booth said. "No, I… I can't afford that school; I can't enrich Parker, not with the science thing, but… you can, Max can-"

He was interrupted when a stream of soda suddenly shot into the air from the bottle that Parker and Max were experimenting on, rising to the height of the platform where the partners were standing. Once the initial shock went by, Booth could only smile at his son's enthusiasm, only just acknowledging the anthropologist's agreement to his request as they watched her father playing with his son.

He might not be a constant presence in his son's life, but he was doing what he could to be a more supportive influence than his own father had been for him…


	70. Double Trouble in the Panhandle

"Conjoined twins wrapped in a sheet?" Sweets asked, staring between Booth and Bones in surprise.

"According to Hodgins," Booth confirmed; he'd certainly never encountered a body like that before, and he'd even seen some pretty strange demons in his time.

"It would help to know how they were wrapped," the younger man inquired.

"Well…" Bones said with a brief shrug. "All the evidence has gone with the wind."

"No other clothing?" Sweets asked.

"According to Hodgins," Bones repeated.

"The murderer didn't want anyone to identify them from their clothes," Booth suggested, only realising how foolish that was as soon as he'd said it.

"They're conjoined twins, you might as well bury them with their driver's licenses in their hands," Sweets said, voicing what Booth had just realised. "Wrapped naked bodies often indicate a careful burial, or, of course, sexual assault."

"OK, you know, that's… uhmm… that's creepy," Booth said, grateful that he could focus on the image of how someone might sexually assault conjoined twins to express his full discomfort as he stood up. "We gotta get going there, Sweets."

"Where?"

"Texas," Booth said as he made for the door. "That's where the circus is."

"Uhhhhh…" Sweets began as he stood up himself. "Circus folk are extremely tight lipped and close knit. They won't tell you anything."

"How do you know?" Bones asked.

"I… you know… I've read articles," Sweets said awkwardly.

"You're the worst liar I've ever met," Booth said, amused at the idea that a man like Sweets couldn't bluff despite his supposed knowledge of human nature. "You read articles?"

"Even I know he's lying," Bones put in.

"OK, I'm adopted-" Sweets began before waving his hands in frustration. "You know what? My story isn't important here-"

"No, it's very important; go ahead," Booth said.

"I…" Sweets sighed, as Bones sat down once again, clearly agreeing with Booth's refusal to give Sweets the chance to back out. "When I reached the age of majority, I tried to find my birth mother, a psychic who worked in the circus and carnival circuit in Florida."

"Bio-mom was a carnie?" Booth asked.

"Let's stay on track," Sweets said firmly. "The point is no one would talk to me."

"Were you wearing a suit?" Booth asked.

"You'll be wearing a suit and they won't open up to you either," Sweets said, as he slumped back into his chair. "I'm just trying to be helpful here."

"I suspect Sweets is right," Bones put in. "I studied a carnival for six weeks as research for my cultural anthropology dissertation. No one would tell me anything, even though I became quite adept on the highwire."

"Fine," Booth said, smiling to himself as the solution came to him. "If they're gonna talk to their own, we will go undercover."

"What?" Sweets asked.

"If we're joining the circus we'll need an act," Bones smiled. "I…I'm quite adept on the highwire."

"No," Booth said, inspiration striking him as an opportunity to use an old skill from his days as Angel that he hadn't exercised for a while. "You know what? We'll have a knife-throwing act."

"I can't throw knives," Bones began.

"I can," Booth interjected. "I had the best knife-skills in the rangers."

This might be unusual circumstances, but there was still something kind of fun about the thought of joining the circus regardless of the circumstances…

* * *

  
"Russian?" Booth asked, looking at his partner in frustration as they walked in their new trailer. "You had to pick Russian?"

"I know; brilliant, right?" Bones smiled at him, clearly either ignoring or really ignorant of his frustration. "It just popped into my head."

"You know what? Don't pop things, Bones," Booth said, even as he dialled a particular number on his phone to try and deal with his other linguistics-related query. "Sweets! What the hell is a first of May?"

" _A newbie, a rookie_ ," Sweets replied, as Booth put the phone down while setting it to speaker.

"Why would a little person be referred to as a 24-hour man?" Bones added.

" _Oh, had a little trouble with the lingo, huh_?" Sweets sounded amused at the other end. " _He's the advance person;_ _he goes to town ahead of the circus and sets everything up. If you like I could e-mail you a lexicon_."

"I would certainly appreciate that," Bones said.

"Sure," Sweets replied. " _Uhm… can I offer a piece of advice_?"

"Well, that's why we called you, Sweets," Booth noted.

"Don't try too hard to be their friends," the psychologist said. " _Act like you're more interested in each other than any of them, alright? They will come to you_."

"OK," Bones said. "Thanks, Sweets."

"So," Booth said, as he ended the phone call, realising that they were still obligated to go along with their current bluff. "Sex, right?"

"Oh, good idea," Bones said.

"OK," Booth said as he stood up, trying to think of the least embarrassing way to do this…

"What I think we need to do is get a synco-pated rhythm going that takes advantage of the natural frequency of the springs," Bones explained, as she began to bounce against the walls of the trailer with her hands, Booth quickly following her example out of a lack of alternatives.

This whole situation might be necessary to sell their story, but it still felt a bit weird to him to be faking sex like this; he wasn't sure if this would count as overdoing it or not…

Seriously, the lingo thing alone was going to be a problem; who would have thought getting answers in a circus would be so complicated?

* * *

  
"I already sent off the girls' medical records," Doctor Muir said as he showed them into his office. "I'm not sure how else I can help you."

"I want to run my fingers through your hair," Bones said.

"Why?" the doctor asked uncertainly.

"To prove you were in a sexual relationship with Julie van Owen," Bones replied, as though the answer was obvious.

"And running your fingers through my hair will prove that?" Muir asked uncertainly.

"Yep," Bones nodded.

"I'll tell you what; look up Doctor Brennan on the Internet," Booth said. "She's getting pretty famous for this kind of stuff."

"You're not gonna understand this…" Muir began.

"You had a threesome?" Booth asked; he might not have been 'allowed' to do that with Darla and Drusilla, but Angelus had a few ideas about what he'd do if he'd had the chance, even if Booth had never been that way inclined.

"Absolutely not," Muir said. "I dated Jenny first and then I fell in love with Julie…. and Jenny didn't really like that."

"That's why he recommended separating the twins," Bones noted.

"No, that's not true," Muir protested. "My recommendation was totally objective."

"Maybe the mother found out and sued his whole life away?" Booth pseudo-whispered to his partner.

"Which is the only reason we kept the relationship a secret," Muir protested.

"Relationship?" Bones asked, before smiling smugly at the doctor. "Sexual relationship?"

"How?" Booth asked, wondering if he was coming across as prejudiced before deciding it didn't matter. "When you were… I'm trying to understand… when you and Julie…"

"The girls had separate genitalia; a fair amount of privacy could be achieved by an eye mask and an MP3 player turned up really loud," the doctor explained, in one of those annoying manners that answered the practicalities of the question without clarifying what Booth really wanted to know. "Julie liked 'Kings of Leon'; Jenny like 'Maroon 5'."

"The American medical association is going to take away your license," Bones said, looking at the doctor in surprise.

"That's a motive for murder," Booth said.

"We should arrest him," Bones continued.

"On what charges?" Muir protested.

"Definitely positive on the suspicion of murder thing," Booth said, as he walked up to place handcuffs on the doctor. "You know, the other thing is just...eh...it's a little confusing."

He appreciated that threesomes weren't exactly uncommon, and he wasn't about to criticise anyone for that kind of relationship even if 'Seeley Booth' might be expected to 'prefer' monogamy, but there was a difference between three people getting involved and two people doing it while a third was basically trying to ignore them despite being in the same room…

* * *

  
"They covered up an accident by making it look like murder," Booth mused, walking through the circus after Bones' final revelation about the circumstances of the twins' death.

"I didn't kill them," Magnum said, walking up behind them with an urgent tone to his voice, clearly unaware of their latest revelation. "I didn't kill them. I loved them, I would never hurt them."

"We know," Bones said solemnly.

"I buried them," Magnum continued. "They needed a proper burial."

"Don't say anything, Magnum," Madame Nina said, walking up behind him along with some of the clowns.

"You asked them not to go on the high wire but that's exactly what they wanted to do," Bones said.

"It's probably the only thing Julie and Jenny ever agreed on," Booth mused; ever since he saw the tension between Buffy and Kendra after the other Slayer first came to town, it amazed him how hard people could find it to get along regardless of how identical they were in so many ways.

"When they dropped to the net, the force of their fall snapped their heads together," Bones continued.

"Yeah," Booth said. "An accident like that, their mother would definitely have sued; the circus would never have survived... You know I'm gonna have to arrest you for interference with a dead body?"

"We're sorry," Bones said. "Aren't we?"

"Yeah, sorry," Booth said, looking apologetically at the other man, lost for anything else to say in these circumstances.

In a way, he was reminded of what Gunn did for Fred when he killed Professor Siedel; this might be 'cleaner' in a way, but one man was still going to bear the brunt of the burden for what others had done…

"We're going to get you a good lawyer," Bones said.

"Just don't bring them into this," Magnum asked, indicating the rest of the circus fold around him. "Because I don't want to shut the circus down because of me."

"What you're gonna have to explain is why you wrapped them in a sheet," Booth said, already guessing that Magnum hadn't acted as solo as he was trying to protest. "Because that's something a woman would do out of respect."

"You'll also have to explain how you forged their handwriting on a note," Bones added, clearly following his reasoning.

"Yeah, I will," Magnum said.

Even as Booth talked about how he'd call the Dallas office, he had a feeling that this circus wouldn't be in town for much longer if he gave them the chance to get away… but, considering that there was no actual _murder_ involved here, he felt comfortable giving them a little leeway to avoid actually being arrested.

He might be Seeley Booth now, but he stood by the belief that there were times when Angel's more 'flexible' approach was the only real choice; right now, with no actual 'crime' needing to be exposed there was no need to rush anything.


	71. Fire in the Ice

There were a few times when Booth disliked the loss of the advantages he'd enjoyed as a vampire compared to what he was now restricted to as a human being, ranging from his greater physical limitations to his own more limited senses, but the thing that really got to him was his more limited ability to heal. He did what he could to avoid being injured, but there was still only so much he could do when he was particularly riled up, and his current damaged hand was a prime example of that. He hadn't even been in a fight, but he'd been so angered at what that Carlson asshole was doing with Wendell in that hockey game that he hadn't even been thinking about what he'd been doing until he realised just how sore his hand felt.

Seriously, after fighting the likes of the Beast and Hamilton and being back to his peak a few hours later, being handicapped by an injured hand for this long because he'd hit a hockey helmet was almost embarrassing…

"Hey, uh, what do you think there, Bones?" he asked, indicating the stretcher where their latest body had been placed.

"I would surmise that the body went into the lake before it froze, then the lake froze, then the body floated up and became attached to the bottom of the ice," Bones explained

"I meant was he murdered?" Bones clarified, even as he noted that Bones's summary at least covered the essential details.

"Oh," Bones said. "Um, maybe. Could have been an accident or a suicide, except… oh, you shouldn't do that."

"It itches, OK?" Booth said, using his pen to scratch the inside of his cast before he turned back to Bones. "Yeah, well, except for what?"

"Trauma to the left maxillary orbit suggests violence," Bones said, examining the damaged skull with her fingers. "It's kind of gross, what you're doing."

"Gross?" Booth repeated. "You got your finger in some guy's maxillary orbit."

"I don't think there's anything else to be learned here, so let's get this Popsicle back to the lab," Bones smiled.

"Hey, look at that," Booth smiled. "Bones, you made a joke."

"Well, I can be quite amusing," Bones said.

Booth was about to respond when he noticed a necklace hanging around the victim's throat, prompting him to lean over and carefully pick it up. "Wait a second…"

"Booth, you aren't wearing any gloves," Bones noted.

"Bones, I…" Booth said, hating what he was about to say but aware of procedure even if he knew he'd done nothing. "Remember that guy I punched out last month during my hockey game? Pete Carlson?"

"Yes; when you broke your hand," Bones acknowledged.

"That's him," Booth said, holding out the necklace as he indicated the corpse. "I'm a suspect. Here."

He didn't like regulations, but even if he _knew_ that he hadn't killed this guy, he had to take himself off the case now that he knew who it was; after his last encounter with Carlson, he wasn't exactly going to be short on the list, so it was best to take himself out of the investigation before anyone could accuse him of compromising it.

* * *

  
"In the course of the game," Booth said, controlling his unease at being on this side of the interrogation table for once as he spoke with Agent Perotta, "the victim and I exchanged blows."

"Who initiated the fight?" Perotta asked.

"It was hockey," Booth replied.

"So, it was spontaneous combustion?"

"The guy hit two of my players," Booth clarified, briefly smiling at the memory of what he'd heard about one of Buffy's earliest 'cases' back in Sunnydale; it hadn't been that funny at the time, but there was something amusing about the concept of a witch being that desperate to 'recapture her youth'. "The ref- he didn't catch that."

"And that made you angry?"

"Not angry enough, you know, to chase him down after the game and kill him," Booth elaborated; he'd had enough issues with rage as Angel and Angelus to know when you shouldn't do something, even if as Angelus it was just because he'd want to do something more long-term when he'd cooled down enough to think.

"So where did you go after the game?" Perotta asked.

"Bones drove me and Wendell to the hospital."

"So, no alibi that night or the next?" Perotta inquired.

"Bones and I are just partners," Booth said; that kind of question was going to come up eventually, so he might as well cut it short now.

"OK, now you're answering questions I had no intention of asking," Perotta said after a moment's pause. "Is it your contention that, uh, your argument with the victim was constrained to the ice?"

"That is my contention," Booth said firmly.

"'Cause I have a-a witness who stated you told Carlson, and I quote, 'You get up off that ice, and we'll settle this out in the parking lot'."

"Trash talking," Booth corrected; some people could really exaggerate certain issues because they were trying to make a big deal out of nothing…

"Let me cut to the chase," the female agent said, pushing her paperwork to the side as she looked at him. "Did you kill Pete Carlson?"

"No," Booth said firmly

"Did you dump his body in the lake?"

"No, I did not, Agent Perotta."

"Do you feel that your experience as the child of an abusive alcoholic has made you more prone to violence?"

Booth only needed a moment to guess where that particular titbit had come from; Perotta didn't strike him as stupid, but she'd taken too long to answer that question to come up with it on her own, and she would have had no reason to go digging for information like that when he was only a possible suspect…

"Excuse me," he said, getting up and leaving the room, slamming the door behind him as he stormed into the observation room, looking at the young psychiatrist in exasperation. "What the hell are you doing?"

"It's part of my job to assist the interrogating agent-" Sweets began.

"You know I didn't murder anyone, Sweets, all right?" Booth glared indignantly. "So what you're doing right now is you're just _studying_ me."

"That's part of our agreement too-"

"You have a question for me, you ask me yourself," Booth interjected. "Don't use her."

"All right, OK, two questions," Sweets said. "One: am I picking up some sexual tension between you and Agent Perotta?"

"How the hell do I know what you're picking up?" Booth countered.

"OK," Sweets noted, apparently at least willing to let that question slide. "Uh, two: underneath your affable exterior is a deep reservoir of rage. My question is, do you always have that under control?"

"You know," Booth said, taking a couple of steps closer to the younger man, "if I didn't, you'd be dead right now instead of just wincing."

"I'm not wincing," Sweets said.

"Don't ever bring my old man up again," Booth said, turning around and slamming the door behind him.

He might have to deal with those unpleasant false memories to give him a reason not to talk about his past, but he was _definitely_ not willing to talk about them, even if it might make the 'lie' of Seeley Booth more convincing.

* * *

  
"I can't believe Pete's gone," the victim's ex-girlfriend said, looking sadly at the field; Booth might not be the official investigator as long as he was a suspect, but at least he had enough influence to take part in the interrogation now that he'd been eliminated as the prime suspect.

"How long ago did you two break up?" Perotta asked.

"Break up?" Chloe asked in surprise. "We didn't break up."

"His teammates think you did," Booth noted.

"No, we had this on-again/off-again thing," Chloe shrugged. "It was casual; no biggie."

"So you didn't mind that he slept with different women?" Perotta asked.

"I wouldn't have minded if he did, but I happen to know he didn't," Chloe said firmly.

"Well, I happen to know that he did, right," Booth countered, not buying that for a second; he'd been uncomfortable when Cordelia started dating the Groosalug even when the two of them _hadn't_ been dating before Groo showed up.

"Who?" Chloe asked.

"Oh, it doesn't matter, does it?" Perotta said nonchalantly. "Given that your relationship was so, um, casual?"

"You slashed his tires, didn't you?" Booth cut in.

"Agent Booth-" Perotta began.

"No-" Chloe tried to say.

"We can prove you did it, Chloe," Perotta continued. "So here's the deal; you tell us the truth from now on, and we won't charge you with vandalism and obstruction of justice, OK?"

"Let's try this again," Booth said. "You slashed-"

"Agent Booth?" Perotta held up her hand.

"Yes," Booth, acknowledging her need to take control of the case. "Of course."

"Let's try this again," Perotta said, turning back to the current interrogation. "You slashed his tires, didn't you?"

"Yes," Chloe said. "I mean, he was sleeping with someone else. I got passions that take over sometimes. You know how it is when the guy you give yourself to just goes off with someone else."

"Who's, um, Albie?" Perotta asked, neatly avoiding responding to that particular area.

"Albie?" Chloe asked, taking a moment to think before she replied. "Albie runs this poker game in back of a Chinese food joint off I Street. Probably why Pete was broke all the time. So, who'd you say Pete was sleeping with?"

"I think we've got enough information for today, Ms. Bratton," Perotta said, recognizing the risks of answering that question. "Thank you very much for your cooperation."

"Thanks," Booth said, deciding to follow the younger agent's example and end that conversation before things could get more awkward.

His old relationships might have been complicated, but at least all involved parties always knew that the other was committed to their partner; the only time anyone had ever 'cheated' was some vague story he recalled hearing about Anya and Spike getting drunk after her wedding to Xander didn't work out…

* * *

  
"Agent Booth," Sweets said, his tone particularly formal even by their usual standards, "it's come to the attention of the deputy director that you are a viable suspect in a murder case."

"Right, OK, and he wants you to make sure that I'm not viable," Booth said, smiling slightly as he scratched his hand with a pencil.

"That's correct," Sweets said.

"Come on, Sweets, you know I didn't kill anyone," Booth said, exaggerating his disbelief at the fact that he was in this position; he could tolerate being accused of something because the Scoobies or his team worried that he'd 'relapsed', but this just felt like they were pushing the issue too far. "So, you know, put that in shrink talk and write out your little form and send it in."

"Yes, of course," Sweets said, holding out a hand to halt Booth as he stood up. "But to do that, I need to ask you some questions."

"Great; shoot," Booth said, nonchalantly sitting back down; the sooner this was over with, the sooner he could get back to business.

"I saw you in that game," Sweets said. "You beat another man to the ice."

"It's hockey," Booth countered. "I was protecting my teammate."

"You broke your hand on his helmet."

"It's hockey," Booth repeated firmly. "You never played, did you?"

"Oh," Sweets shrugged. "I'd run track and cross country and did some wrestling and ch-"

"Chess!" Booth smirked at Sweets' denial. "Checkers?"

"Didn't say that," the psychiatrist said.

"You know what?" Booth said, noting this down for later reference even if he had another point to make right now. "Then you know nothing... It's about teams, okay? And teamwork. Obviously you don't know anything about that, Doctor Sweets."

"You joined the army," Sweets said, trying to retake control of the conversation. "You became a sniper. You joined the FBI. Do you see the, uh, the binding element in those choices? It's violence."

"Or their love of uniforms," Booth said (He might have been all about the violence as Angelus, but he liked to think that his choices as Angel and Booth had been all about saving lives rather than violence). "You ever think that?"

"Agent Booth," Sweets said, "I believe that you are ready to confront the fact… that the violence you may have suffered in childhood-"

"You know what?" Booth interjected.

"-has followed you into adulthood-" Sweets tried to continue.

"Fill out the form," Booth said firmly, just as someone knocked at the door before he could say anything he might regret.

"Not now!" Sweets yelled, before the door opened and Caroline walked in.

"Hiya, Sweets," the lawyer said briefly. "Uh, if you're about finished here, Booth, in accordance with the warrant you made me get, Pete Carlson's phone records are here."

"Ms Julian," Sweets said, "actually, I'm the one that decides when we're done here."

"Of course you are, Cherie, no offence intended," Caroline smiled. "I'll be be delivering the phone records to Agent Perotta. I thought I'd do that in your office."

"Thanks, Cherie," Booth said, smiling at the older woman as she left the office, before he stood up. "We're done."

"Well, we are done, but that was just a coincidence," Sweets said.

"Sweets," Booth said, pausing in the door to look grimly at the younger man, wanting to ensure the doctor understood what he was about to say, "I've killed but I've never murdered before. Look up the difference in your little black book there, OK?"

It might technically be a lie, considering how many people who knew of his full past still considered himself and Angelus equally culpable of each other's actions, but he wasn't about to get into those sort of specifics under these circumstances.

* * *

  
"I'm not positive this is a good idea," Bones said, as Booth watched her feel her way around the rink on her rented skates; it might seem odd to return to the scene of his near-accident to stay awake, but he was just going with what felt right now that the case was concluded.

"Oh, I got you!" Booth said, skating over to help his partner back to her feet/skates. "I got you; stay up here."

As Bones suddenly lost her balance, Booth paused to help her back to her feet, smiling as she followed his lead. "Well, you know what, I got to stay up all night, so who better to keep me company than you?"

"You and me skating is saving you from slipping into a coma?" Bones asked, before she suddenly leaned forward.

"Oh, easy, Bones," Booth said, grabbing her before she could completely lose her balance. "Now I'm gonna go down."

"I have a lot of natural athletic ability," Bones noted.

"Oh, yeah, natural," Booth smiled, as he turned to briefly skare in front of her before taking up a position beside her once again. "I can… I can see that; real smooth and natural. That's it; well done."

"That Agent Perotta," Bones noted, "she really enjoyed working with us."

"Yeah," Booth said, remembering some of Perotta's attempts to integrate with the team, both when he was there and on her own.

"But, um…" Bones said, "You're the only FBI agent I want to work with."

Booth couldn't help but feel touched at that comment; considering some of their initial personal clashes, it was nice to hear that he'd made that much of an impression on her…

"Will you tell me what the Lucky Luciano told you?"

"He's not an Italian opera singer," Booth said, briefly wishing that he'd never mentioned that hallucination; on a personal level, he was surprised that he hadn't hallucinated someone from Angel's life, and still wasn't sure if he should consider it a positive or worrying sign that he was moving on from that time to subconsciously see people that _Booth_ would consider important rather than _Angel_. "Bones, why do you always say that wrong? You do it on purpose, don't you?"

"I would like to know what he said," Bones said, ignoring his question to focus on her own.

"He said that I'm not like my old man," Booth finally answered. "He said I'm made of better stuff."

"Well…" Bones said, looking reassuringly at him, "I don't know your old man, your father, but... I think you're made of very, very good stuff."

"Hey, you know what?" Booth said, giving her a brief grateful smile for the compliment. "Forget about Agent Perotta, all right? Nothing's gonna change between me and you."

"Well, entropy is a natural force that pulls everything apart at a subatomic level," Bones countered. "Everything changes."

"Not everything, Bones," Booth said, teasingly pushing her along the ice, enjoying the comforting banter despite his own knowledge that she was right.

His change from Angelus to Angel to Booth might have all been exceptional circumstances, but he had to acknowledge that it was proof that change was possible; he just liked to think that big changes required equally exceptional catalysts.


	72. The Hero in the Hold

Checking over his reflection in the mirror, Booth smiled as he assessed the rented tuxedo; he still wasn't completely comfortable in these 'monkey suits', but he appreciated the circumstances that had led to him being invited to tonight's dinner in the first place.

"Look at that," he said, nodding in approval at his image- another of the simple things he enjoyed about his humanity- before his phone rang, a quick check confirming that it was his partner. "I'm hurrying, Bones."

" _Do you need directions_?" the anthropologist asked.

"No," Booth confirmed, slightly offended at the idea that he wouldn't have worked out a good route already. "I do not need directions because I am driving."

" _My GPS can provide perfect directions in several languages_."

"Well, get this, OK?" Booth said, as he walked over to the coffee table to pick up his new watch. "Parker got me this new watch, and it does the same thing."

" _Oh, in several languages_?"

"No," Booth said, wondering why anyone would care about a feature like that; surely someone would only need to hear directions in one language rather than several, since it wasn't likely several people would be using one person's car.

" _Well, then it's not the same thing_ ," Bones countered.

"I bet you are looking beautiful, huh?" Booth commented, adjusting his tie in another mirror. "Because I am in the finest tux that money can rent."

" _Well, I'm on my way home to get dressed_ ," Bones said. " _But you need to be there an hour and a half before me to watch the tribute video. My GPS indicates that it's a… twenty-five minute drive for you. This is my big night, Booth_."

"Alright, Bones, listen," Booth said, checking around a couple of details on the nearby tables. "Don't worry, I will be there when they crown you super scientist; I will be the guy in the cocky belt buckle and the snazzy rented tux."

His little speech was cut short when he heard a knocking at his apartment door. Briefly noting the interruption at that end, he ignored Bones asking why he wasn't driving yet as he opened the door…

* * *

  
As he emerged from his latest prison, Booth didn't know if he should feel insulted or amused at the discovery that he'd been sealed in a yellow submarine in some kind of larger metal room. On the one hand, it explained how he'd managed to get out of there so easily, since that kind of thing wasn't exactly _meant_ to keep anything contained, but it still didn't explain what was going on here beyond the obvious assumption that it was the Gravedigger.

His supernatural foes were a possibility, of course, but since he'd received a memo to inform him that Bones and Hodgins were being called in for what was almost certainly a meeting about that case given the other attendees, he felt comfortable pegging the Gravedigger as the culprit. Sinking him in a coffin might be a good way to immobilise him, and it inspired some uncomfortable memories, but anyone who knew him from that time should have known that this wouldn't be enough to keep him trapped, and if someone from his past as Angel had found him, he'd probably be dead already…

Getting away from that depressing thought, that still didn't explain what he was doing here… or what he'd just heard…

"Who's there?" Booth called out, focusing on a shadowed corner of the room. "Who's that?"

"It's me."

"Who's me?" Booth asked, trying to place that strangely familiar voice.

"Best buddy you ever had," the voice said, emerging from the darkness to reveal a young soldier that Booth had only ever seen in his implanted memories. "Your words."

"Teddy?" Booth said, shocked at the sight; he'd done his research to confirm that the people in his fake memories had actually existed, but that didn't mean he had been expecting to see a dead man treating him as though they were old friends when they'd never _really_ met. "This isn't real."

"I'm gonna go with real," Teddy said, thumping the submarine and leaving a ringing sound. "Nice monkey suit, by the way; I would never have thought to go formal to a kidnapping."

"Look," Booth said awkwardly, trying to focus on the more plausible explanations than that he'd just encountered his first ghost since he ceased being a vampire, "no offence, but you know, I've been drugged, electrocuted… stuffed in a…Beatles toy. You're…you're a hallucination, that's what you are; you're a hallucination."

"Aww, that's nice," Teddy said, as he closed the lid of the submarine. "I show up to help you and you toss me off as a hallucination."

"You're dead, corporal," Booth said firmly. "I felt your heart stop."

"No use crying over spilt milk, Sarge," Teddy said, surprisingly casual about the idea of his own death.

"You know what?" Booth said. "You're not real. This isn't real. You know what? I am gonna focus on what is real. Right? Real, like getting out of this place. OK…"

"Nah, Sarge; it's too high," Teddy said, dismissing his glance at the hatch door on an upper catwalk and indicating another door on their level. "How about that one?"

"I already saw that," Booth said, walking over to the door firmly, trying to ignore the temptation to argue with the hallucination/ghost/whatever-Teddy-was in favour of getting out. Whatever his former spotter was doing here, if this was the Gravedigger, he had to keep moving before whatever time limit he was facing ran out…

* * *

  
Slamming his hand against the door, Booth couldn't believe that things had become this desperate this quickly; he was just trying to get out of the hold, and he'd triggered some kind of flood from the other side with no way to stop it.

The only bright side about this mess was that it at least made it easier for him to get to the upper catwalk as the water rose up, but that wasn't going to help him for long unless he could actually get out of this mess and through this damn door, and he was already losing his tux jacket trying to get out of this shit…

"What the hell's that supposed to be for?" he asked, looking at Teddy as he emerged from the water with a large yellow pipe.

"It's a fulcrum, Sarge," Teddy said, sounding unusually out of breath for some kind of ghost as he put the pipe in the wheel on the front of the door (An abstract part of Booth's mind appreciated the further evidence that the kid wasn't the First playing some game; whatever the First might be, he was certain it wasn't corporeal yet). "We, uh, both work it together."

"Yeah, right there," Booth confirmed, finding the right point on the wheel as the two began to push. "Ready?"

With that instruction, Teddy pushed down on the pipe while Booth pulled the wheel up, the door opening after a few moments' effort.

"Get in," the ex-vampire said urgently.

"Hey, real people go first, Sarge-"

"Get in before I change my mind, will you?" Booth said, grabbing Teddy by the shirt and pushing him in, trying not to consider the implications of that moment of physical contact until he was out of the immediate danger even as he _followed_ Teddy up the next flight of stairs. Sealing the circular floor-hatch behind him, Booth grabbed Teddy's shoulder and began to check his face and body, shock growing by the moment when he actually felt everything.

"Whoa, OK, get a grip Sarge," Teddy said, looking uncomfortably at him. "You're attacking your own hallucination."

"You are not a hallucination," Booth said firmly. "You helped me open up that hatch. I wouldn't have been able to open up that hatch without you."

"OK, OK, so what does that make me?" Teddy asked.

"You… are a ghost," Booth smiled.

"I'm a ghost," Teddy repeated, as Booth turned to look around the room. "Hey, why aren't you scared?"

"You being a ghost is not even on the list of things that scare me," Booth said, studying the assorted decorations of toys and stuffed animals in the room on top of a pirate skeleton.

He had no real idea what the ghost was doing here, but he had to find out how to get further up this ship before whatever trap the Gravedigger had set kicked in; this ship was too large and not airtight enough for him to just suffocate, and the Gravedigger couldn't afford to leave him here long enough to just starve to death…

* * *

  
"So," Teddy said, as Booth explored the lower area of the ship, "just to sum things up, the ship's about to explode and now there's no way to stop it."

"Rub it in," Booth said grimly; whether this guy was a ghost or a hallucination, he didn't need to have the stupidity of his last action thrown in his face all over again. "I got you killed twice."

"Where we going?" Teddy asked.

"We got to get out of here," Booth said, turning down another walkway.

"Hey," Teddy noted. "Even if we get out onto the deck, we're gonna have to jump into the ocean."

"That's right," Booth said.

"Where if the fall doesn't kill us we'll get hypothermia and drown."

"Oh no," Booth smiled. "I get hypothermia and drown. Who knows what'll happen to you?"

"If you die Sarge, I'm gone," Teddy noted solemnly. "There's not a single person left on the planet who will remember me. It'd be like I was never here."

"No."

"No?" Teddy asked.

"No," Booth said firmly. "There's… there's that, uh…girl. She won't forget you."

"You mean Claire?" Teddy asked.

"Yeah, Claire," Booth nodded, making a note to check that when he got back; he might be fairly sure that Teddy wasn't a hallucination, but there was no harm making sure that everyone was remembering the appropriate facts. "You know, every…day on the anniversary of your death I…I go to your grave and I uh…I visit you. And there's always flowers from Claire."

"Did you ever see her?" Teddy asked.

"From a distance, yeah."

"Why don't you talk to her?"

"She blames me for your death," Booth said, feeling more 'comfortable' voicing that statement to someone who would understand it than he ever would otherwise.

"That's crazy," Teddy said.

"That's not crazy," Booth said, turning to look at the younger man. "I blame me too."

He might not have been there directly, but he sometimes wondered if Teddy would have survived if someone else had been in that position before history was rewritten to accommodate the new 'fact' of Seeley Booth's life. He knew that the Powers _could_ change history, given that Jasmine and Skip had created that other life for Cordelia when they'd turned her part-demon, but he tried not to consider what had happened to everyone he remembered from Booth's past before he was inserted in there…

"Here we go," he said, looking around the larger room he'd found; it wasn't perfect, but it might be enough for what he had to do next.

"Sarge?" Teddy said.

"Yeah," Booth replied.

"Tomorrow's the anniversary," Teddy continued. "I need a favour."

"If I survive this, anything," Booth said, looking around the walls of the room.

"I need you to tell Claire I loved her."

"You never told her?" Booth asked, halting his search to look at the younger man in surprise.

"I was twenty," Teddy said. "I didn't know how to say it."

"What?" Booth asked, surprised at this admission. "You say, 'I love you'. I mean, what's so hard about that?"

"What?" Teddy countered. "You've never loved somebody and didn't say it to 'em?"

There was nothing that Booth could say to that, as he suddenly remembered how long he'd taken to confess his love for Buffy to her directly, or the fact that he'd never actually _said_ those words to Cordelia even if he'd admitted to having feelings for her…

"So maybe that's why I'm here," Teddy mused. "To get you to say "I love you" to somebody."

"We can get through here," Booth said, examining a nearby wall as an alternative to facing that particular discussion.

"Get through the solid metal wall?" Teddy asked.

"No, the stairs," Booth corrected, indicating the bolts on the wall in a very distinctive pattern. "You see, the stairs. The thinnest interior bulkhead of a ship is going to be along the stairs; we're going to blast our way through this."

It wasn't the safest plan he'd ever attempted, but when he'd gone up against the Circle and ended up trapped in Hell, he'd done more dangerous things.

* * *

  
As he climbed up towards the deck of the ship, Booth tried not to think about the fact that he was carrying the body of a ghost; he had to treat the situation in front of him, and the situation in front of him was that his friend was in trouble and needed to get to safety.

"You still with me, Teddy?" he asked, looking urgently at the young spotter.

"Yeah," Teddy said, arm over Booth's shoulder as his legs dragged below him. "But I got to tell you, I feel like we've kinda… been here before."

"I'm sorry I got you killed," Booth said, feeling like he had to say that as he 'remembered' how their last mission together had ended. "I was so anxious to get off that shot, take out my target that I forgot to tell you…"

"You told me to get down twice," Teddy countered, his tone as firm as it could be despite his 'injury'. "You gave the order; I didn't listen."

"What?" Booth said, as they reached the bottom of another set of stairs, unable to believe that Teddy was blaming himself for his own death.

"Sarge, stop," Teddy said, the two halting at the foot of the stairs. "I didn't come here to haunt you; I came to tell you it wasn't your fault."

Looking at the young man, Booth could only think about the 'memory' of staring at this young man's body, helicopters descending towards him as 'Seeley Booth' processed the knowledge that his friend had died…

He knew that he couldn't have done anything, but it was like all his memories of Angelus; just because he consciously recognised that he'd done all he could didn't mean that he accepted it subconsciously.

Trying to force that memory aside, he continued to advance up the stairs, trying to help the young man up the fragile stairs while trying not to think about whatever would happen when those plastic explosives he'd discovered went off.

He'd faced death so many times, but he'd always had something he could fight; any person responsible for this mess was miles away, and he had no way of knowing if anyone even knew where he was right now…

"Put me down, Sarge," Teddy said, as they advanced along another corridor. "You don't have to carry me any more."

"It doesn't work that way, Teddy," Booth replied, smiling as he finally saw what could only be the door to the deck at the top of the next flight of stairs; he'd been on enough ships to have a decent idea of how high/deep/whatever the term was they usually were.

Walking out of the ship's interior, Booth smiled as he took in the feel of the sunlight on his face once again; he might still need to find a way off this damn ship, but at least he might be able to swim to safety before the plastic explosive went off…

"Rangers lead the way, Sarge," Teddy smiled.

"Right, just lead the way, Corporal," Booth said, crouching down to let Teddy rest against the wall of the ship. "There; alright?"

Glancing up, Booth smiled in relief as he saw a helicopter coming down towards the ship; there was no way to know if it was the Gravedigger or someone coming to save him, but either way, it gave him a chance…

"Sarge?" Teddy said, drawing Booth's attention back to his friend. "I knew what you did for me… How far you carried me…"

There was nothing that Booth felt comfortable saying about that, prompting him to look back up at the helicopter for something he could focus on that wouldn't make this moment feel more awkward.

He hated being there when good people died; he felt so much pressure to make their last moments pleasant and never really knew what to say…

"Sarge?" Teddy said, drawing his attention back to the young man/ghost. "One more thing I got to tell you… No way you're getting the deposit back on that tux."

Booth could only smile at that little joke before the helicopter settled down on the deck, the door opening to reveal Doctor Temperance Brennan leaning out of the craft to urgently beckon him over. Glancing down to see that Teddy had vanished, Booth took a moment to wonder about what had just happened here- what had Teddy been doing here and why had he left now?- before he turned and ran for the helicopter, clambering inside before it began to ascend to safety.

He'd need to work out what had just taken place from the spiritual perspective later, but right now, given how urgently his partner was calling for him, discretion as definitely the better part of valour.

* * *

  
Looking out at the white stones of Arlington National Cemetery, Booth was once again left wondering what it said about mankind that it 'immortalised' its soldiers in such a manner. On the one hand, it was good to know that their sacrifices wouldn't be forgotten, and the equality of the grave sites leant a nice message regardless of rank or experience, but on the other hand, it was so large and nobody ever seemed to learn the lesson…

Then again, that was something only mankind could deal with, when Booth thought about it; America and humanity had to learn to move past violence to find a better way on their own. He might have hated Jasmine's methods, but she was right that they needed to move on and find peace; it just shouldn't come at the expense of the freedom that had inspired this nation in the first place.

"Thanks for coming to get me, Bones," he said at last.

"You should have stayed in the hospital another day," Bones said firmly.

"No, I didn't mean getting me out of the hospital," Booth said, briefly awkward before he finished his explanation. "I meant coming on the helicopter… and the ship. Thanks for saving my life."

Bones didn't reply to that statement, but her awkward expression was all that he needed.

"I got you this," she said, handing him a new belt buckle instead of another verbal response.

"Cocky!" Booth smiled as he took the offered gift. "How'd you find that? That's hard to find."

"I read through your report," Bones continued. "It seems as if you would need two people to do most of what you did."

"I had help," Booth said, taking a moment to think before deciding that honest would be the best option right now. "There was a ghost."

"You were injured, drugged, disoriented, breathing bad air…" Bones countered. "There are no such things as ghosts."

"Whatever you have to tell yourself, Bones," Booth said, not wanting to get into that discussion right now; it wasn't like he could give her any evidence without compromising his identity, after all.

"Whose ghost?" Bones asked, curious despite herself.

"He's buried over there," Booth said, indicating the appropriate grave, appreciating her casual acceptance of at least part of his story despite her own doubts.

"The ghost?"

"Corporal Edward Parker," Booth elaborated. "He was slain while serving his country… He was twenty. He was just a kid."

"Was it… your fault that he died?" Bones asked, looking sympathetically at him.

"No," Booth said after a moment's thought. "Fortunes of war; it wasn't my fault."

It had taken him a few hours to accept Teddy's argument, but if he couldn't believe the ghost of the man he was mourning then it cheapened their whole relationship.

"You see that woman over there?" he added, indicating Claire as she walked up to the grave, dressed in a light pink coat. "Her name is Claire. I have a message for her from Teddy."

"What, a message from a ghost?" Bones asked as he began to walk towards the grave.

"You wait here, OK?" Booth glanced back at his partner before continuing on towards the young woman who meant so much to a man he'd technically never met.

The circumstances under which he'd received it might be odd, but if Teddy wanted this message delivered, Booth was going to pass it on…

Glancing over at Bones as he spoke with Claire, he smiled as he saw Teddy standing beside his partner in full dress uniform; whether Bones saw it or not, _he_ knew that Teddy was there to see him pass on the message, and that was all that mattered right now.


	73. The Princess and the Pear

"All right, all right, all right," Booth said, responding to his partner's voice from outside his apartment door, trying to ignore the discomfort in his back as he walked towards the door; he might be half-dressed and in some notable pain right now, but once he had a chance to limber up he was sure he'd be fine. "I'm coming, it's… just keep it down."

"What's taking so long?" Bones asked, knocking again before Booth opened the door, looking critically at him. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Booth said casually. "Come on in; how about some coffee? Arabian Bean!"

"You hurt your back again?" Bones asked.

"No, no, no…" Booth began to protest, before deciding it wasn't worth it; trying to lie to Doctor Temperance Brennan about anything related to the skeleton was like trying to trick Giles about demons. "It's that obvious, huh?"

"Your gait suggests you re-strained your anterior longitudinal ligament," Bones noted.

"Yeah, well, I blame the couch, all right; I fell asleep last night watching the game…" Booth said dismissively. "Look, I figured you fixed my back last time, really well, and I just thought that maybe you could fix it again, so use your little magic knuckles, and hit it up, and we're good to go."

"Booth, if this has become a recurring problem, you should see a specialist," Bones countered.

"Right, I get it, all disclaimers apply," Booth said dismissively. "Here we go, hit the back, chop-chop; we got a case."

"No!"

"What do you mean _no_?" Booth said, turning around to look at her. "Last time I had this, you were begging to help me."

"I probably shouldn't have touched you the last time," Bones said. "You need a medical doctor."

"I'm not asking you to perform surgery; just do what you did last time and fix it with your magic knuckles..." Booth said, smiling encouragingly at her. "Look, there's no one I trust more to get my back and crack it, than _you_."

"Wow!" Bones smiled, touched at the compliment.

"You want more?"

"No, that was effective; turn around," Bones said, letting him turn around as she walked up behind him and placed her arms under his, her head between his hands. "OK, ready?"

Booth had just started to complement his partner when a new crack filled the room, leaving him with a new sense of pain along his spine that surpassed anything he'd felt since he became human.

He was suddenly grateful that most memories of Seeley Booth's time in combat as a soldier had been 'fake'; he wasn't sure how he'd have coped with actual torture without his vampire abilities…

* * *

  
" _Did your daughter live at home with you, Mr Kim_?" Perotta asked, facing the father of their current victim while Booth simply watched it over the laptop video link; setting this up might have been unconventional, but wasn't going to miss out on a case just because he couldn't do field work.

" _No_ ," Mr Kim replied off-screen. " _Kendra lived in a condo in Logan Circle_."

"Look, ask him when was the last time he saw his daughter," Booth put in, his voice low as he spoke to his colleague; this wasn't the best method of conducting an interrogation, but it was the best he could come up with

" _What was that_?" Mr Kim asked.

" _This is Agent, um, Booth_ ," Perotta said, apparently turning the screen around as Booth found himself looking at a middle-aged Chinese-looking man.

"Hello?" Booth smiled awkwardly, briefly uncomfortable at this exposure before pushing it aside; his painkillers had made him slip up, but he might as well go with this now that he was here.

" _He's unable to be with us in person_ ," the other agent continued.

" _Kendra and I didn't see each other much, despite the fact that I put a roof over her head_ ," Mr Kim said, after a momentary awkward silence.

" _According to the modeling agency that booked your daughter, all of her checks were sent to your address_ ," Perotta noted.

" _The money went to pay the mortgage on the condo, which is also in my name_ ," Mr Kim clarified.

"It's kind of a weird arrangement, now isn't it?" Booth noted; it was harder to judge this guy's full attitude across a video link, but he didn't need to fully read body cues to pick up on what didn't seem right about this mess.

" _So's this_ ," the other man noted, glaring at the screen.

"Well, considering my situation and my back, just… continue," Booth shrugged (Maybe this hadn't been a good idea when he was still on all these painkillers).

" _Kendra was about as irresponsible as a person could be_ ," Mr Kim continued, a darker edge to his voice. " _I told her, after she paid her debt to me, she could spend her money how she wanted_."

" _Tough love_ ," Perotta noted.

"Did you give her a sword?" Booth asked, after a brief silence.

" _A sword_?"

"It's like a knife, but it's huge," Booth clarified.

" _No_ ," Mr Kim said firmly.

"But did your daughter mention that she might have something of value?" Booth asked.

" _No_."

"Probably because you'd take it away from her."

" _OK, this doesn't work_ ," Perotta said, turning the laptop away from Mr Kim.

"Don't shut me off!" Booth yelled, before the screen went black as the camera view blurred; evidently Perotta had closed the laptop at her end.

"Damnit," he said, staring at the ground in frustration (looking at the ceiling would just hurt his back even more).

He knew that his medication might have made him too talkative, but he hadn't been _that_ bad… had he?

* * *

  
"OK, you know what?" Booth said, as he finished listening to his partner's explanation about her and Sweets' close encounter with a literal black knight in a potentially brutal car crash. "I'm coming in, all right? You could've been killed."

" _No, you shouldn't move, Booth_ ," Bones countered. " _With a herniated disc, the splintered cartilage can irritate the nerves and_ -"

"I'm fine," Booth interjected.

" _So the pain is gone_?"

"Don't feel a thing," Booth said, trying to stay standing as he held his gun. "I might not be moving as fast, but, hey, still haven't lost my edge. So why wasn't Perotta with you?"

" _I was with Sweets_ ," the anthropologist said.

"That's like being protected by a Smurf," Booth protested. "Not the sheriff, the guy who was in charge. I don't even know his name, but he was blue, small guy…"

" _Booth, have you taken more Vicodin_?" Bones asked, Booth making a brief response he didn't fully register. " _Look, Booth, I'm fine. Sweets is fine. A little shaken up, but really, we're both fine. Please don't come in_."

"If you think so," Booth said. "But I'm ready."

" _That's amazing in your condition_ ," Bones noted.

"Well, you know me," Booth said (Considering what he had once been capable of, it was still humiliating to find himself being kept out of action this long by a simple damaged back).

" _I really think you should just take your Vicodin and rest_ ," Bones said, in that tone that was as close to pleading as she'd allow herself to make when someone wasn't facing potential death.

"All right," Booth said in resignation. "Let me talk to Perotta."

" _All right_ ," Bones said, followed by a distant conversation over the line until a new voice spoke down the phone.

" _How are you, Agent Booth_?" Perotta asked.

"The only reason that I'm not coming in right now is because Bones told me not to," Booth said firmly. "But she is your responsibility. Nothing can happen to her, okay? If anything happens to her, you know, that silky black hair and… that soft skin…"

" _I will not let her out of my sight_ ," Perotta said. " _You have my word_. _Now, uh, we should really get back to the case, Agent Booth_."

"Am I stopping you?" Booth asked, as the phone line terminated, leaving him to turn the TV on to an amusing cartoon; if he couldn't be on the case, he should do something to distract his mind from what Bones might be up against without him.

Thinking back, he really should watch his mouth when he was on medication; he sometimes wondered if he was just more 'vulnerable' to the side-effects because he didn't grow up in the present and had all his vaccinations by 'magic'.

* * *

  
"So he killed her because he loved her so much?" Booth asked, after hearing his partner's summary of the case.

Sometimes, he really wondered how love had become so screwed up over the centuries; he'd never really thought about it much as Liam, but Angelus had played at it enough to get a kind of idea about the 'rules' even if he didn't understand them on an emotional level, and he was sure people had never done something that stupid…

"The whole Age of Chivalry was irrational," Bones said, indicating Booth's X-rays as she spoke. "Knights, maidens, thank goodness we've moved through the Reformation and the enlightenment and into the age of reason. Do you see what I mean?"

"Not at all," Booth said. "I gotta tell you, I think they had it pretty good idea with the whole chivalry thing; you know, open cart doors, kill dragons, small hearts…"

"You still on Vicodin?"

"Yeah, a little," Booth admitted.

"OK," Bones said, indicating the X-rays again, "what I'm trying to show you is that your doctor's wrong. You've been misdiagnosed."

"What?" Booth asked, taking the X-ray from her. "Give me that."

"Just a small misalignment," Bones said, as a brief glance at the X-ray was enough for Booth to confirm that he couldn't see what his partner was talking about. "I'd be happy to fix it for you."

"No, no, no," Booth countered. "Last time you did that, I almost ended up in a wheelchair."

"Don't you trust me?"

"You know what?" Booth said, wishing he could ignore the hurt tone in his partner's voice. "Let's not make it about trust!"

"Well, it's a fact, it's not what I make of it," Bones said, putting down the X-ray as she stood back up. "You ready?"

"Oh, definitely not ready," Booth said, even as he got up from the couch, allowing Brennan to wrap her arms around his neck before there was a knock on the door.

"It's open!" he called over, just as his partner cracked his back. "Wow!"

"Oh!" Perotta said, walking in at the moment of the crack. "I didn't- I thought you said the door was open."

"It is open," Bones said. "I'm done. I was just leaving."

"Oh!" Perotta, holding up a large brown paper bag. "No, no, no. I just, um, brought some chilli I made, but, um, I'll just leave that there, and you can, um…are you all right?"

"Yeah, he's fine now!" Bones said.

"I gotta tell you, I'm a little afraid to move," Booth said, holding still as he waited for any sign of new agony in his back while trying to process this turn of events; how had Perotta decided that it was good to visit him?

"He's fine," Bones said, walking away from her position behind him. "Please, you stay."

"Oh, I can't; you stay."

"I've got to go," Bones said, as the two women turned to talk out of his kitchen area. "I can't stay."

"Wait, now nobody's staying?" Booth called after them, the sound of the door shutting his only response. "Hello?"

He appreciated having a few moments to himself to focus on getting better after the last few days of backache and whatever Bones had just done to him, but that didn't mean he couldn't feel insulted at how easily everyone decided to leave him behind.


	74. The Bones that Foam

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, they never named the character who was sold a 'lemon' car in the script for the original episode, so I've taken an example from a other stories I've seen and named him after the actor who played him.

"I thought the guy was dead," Booth asked his partner as they drove up to their victim's car dealership, just as she'd finished explaining the results of their assessment.

"He is dead, but his skin was moving," Bones explained.

"Wait a second," Booth asked, his mind flashing back to some of the parasite demons he'd encountered as Angel and hoping that it wasn't one of those. "Moving skin on a dead guy?"

"Yes; then he started foaming."

"Wait a second; foaming?" Booth asked, as they got out of the car and headed for the building, hiding his relief that it wasn't a demon as no parasite would do that to an already-dead host. "OK, what would cause that? Too much beer? Or maybe he ate soap?"

"You should stop using cartoons as a scientific reference point,"

"OK," Booth cut in before they could get into another argument about a joke. "You know the guy who owns this place, he has a monkey."

"Does he feel that a monkey will inspire me to buy a car?"

"Bones, it's marketing, OK?" Booth said, trying to avoid explaining something he wasn't entirely clear on himself. "Look, hey, 'we don't sell cars'…"

"'We sell adventure'!" a woman said, dressed in a stereotypical jungle explorer's outfit as she poked her head around a corner. "So, what can the Mighty Mo put you in today? Mmm, you look like a sporty two-door man."

"Actually, he has a very nice car," Bones put in, indicating the car just outside the dealership.

"Ooh, I'll say," the woman said. "That Sequioa's a honey."

"Yeah, tell me about it," Booth smiled.

"Roomy enough, you could have a Super Bowl party back there," the woman continued. "What is that, GPS, side air bags?"

"We're looking for-" Bones began

"Such great gas mileage for, you know, a can-do machine. Are you looking to trade in?"

"No, we're looking for-" Bones began.

"Because I can offer you a sweet deal from the heart of the jungle," the woman said, walking over to a large brown jeep before letting out a faux roar.

"We're here to see Chet Newcomb," Bones finished.

"OK," the woman said, her voice lowering as she spoke to Booth, "Between us, as much as we all love Chet, as Bwana of the Month, I'm really in a better position to offer you a deal. So…"

"Right," Booth said as he pulled out his badge. "And that'd be just great, Mighty Mo, if we were here to buy a car, but we're not. You know, FBI."

"Well, he's back there," the woman said, smiling awkwardly at him.

"Thank you," Booth said, returning her brief roar with one of his own, shrugging at his partner's pointed stare. "What? She roared me first."

"Doesn't mean you have to roar her back," Bones said, as they walked into Newcomb's office to find him talking with a woman in a red jumper and a black-and-white dress.

"The doctor said you have to take all of these on a full stomach," the woman said, indicating the small container in his hands.

"Desmo… desmopress…" the man said as he studied the label.

"Desmopressin?" Bones finished. "Do you have kidney problems?"

"No, it's just a, uh, slight infection," Newcomb said, putting the bottle aside. "Hi; Chet Newcomb. What can I do for you today?"

"Uh, with the FBI," Booth said. "I'd like to ask you a few questions, you know… in private."

"Oh," Chet said, indicating the woman. "Well, uh, this is my wife, Vanessa."

"How do you do, ma'am?" Booth said. "Pleasure to meet you. We just, uh, have to have a few words."

"Oh, well, I was just going," Vanessa said. "I have a fitting anyway- a client waiting on a bridesmaid's dress."

"Actually, you might want to stay," Bones finished. "Booth has some bad news about your husband's brother; he may need consoling."

"Bones…" Booth sighed.

"Wasn't that sensitive?"

"What happened to my brother?" Newcomb asked.

"He was found at the base of a cliff at Whitney Cove," Booth

"Oh my God," Vanessa groaned. "I told him he that was crazy to try that bungee thing."

"There was an accident?" Chet asked.

"No," Bones said. "He was... What's a sensitive way of saying murdered?"

"Murdered?" Chet said, Booth inwardly cursing the anthropologist's inability to master tact; how could a woman that smart think that a stage whisper was a discreet way to ask such an important question?

"Sorry," the agent said. "When you're ready, we'd like to ask you a few questions about your brother."

"He was murdered?"

"Yeah, we're very sorry for your loss," Booth said, giving Vanessa a moment to comfort her husband before he continued his questioning. "Where was the last place your brother worked?"

"Um, until a couple of weeks ago he worked... he worked here," Newcomb explained, indicating a wall filled with 'Employee of the Month' pictures that all seemed to depict the deceased. "Uh, then he left and he went to work for Criterion across the street."

"Can you think of anyone who wanted to do him harm?" Bones asked.

"He was a car salesman," Vanessa said, clearly confused at the question.

"Jungle Jim and Alex got into it pretty bad when Alex quit," Chet noted thoughtfully.

"Jungle Jim?" Booth asked, surprised that someone could legitimately be referred to by that name even as he made a note of the name.

Looking at the model of the aforementioned 'Jungle Jim', Booth had to admit that the man might have the strength to throw the victim off a cliff with the force required to do the damage, but that didn't explain what Bones had said about the skin dissolving…

* * *

  
"Nice grip on this iron," Booth said, swinging the gold golf club they had taken off Kevin Howard, the 'Lemon Guy' who was apparently the man others felt most likely to have wanted their victim dead. "So, is this the type of club that you used to bash in Alex Newcomb's windshield?"

"Hey, this guy took my money!" Howard said indignantly. "And when there was a problem, it was like I didn't even exist."

"He's lucky the only thing you went after was his windshield," Booth said, looking thoughtfully at the suspect. "You know, they call you 'Lemon Guy' at the dealers; don't suppose you could clear that up?"

"A lemon is a car that craps out on you three months to a year after you buy it," Howard explained. "I didn't get more than ten miles off that lot when the brakes failed. That's not a lemon; that's a death trap."

"Yeah, you feared for your life," Booth noted.

"No, not my life," Howard corrected. "My kid, who was in the backseat, four years old, he cracked a rib, he… hit his head, he got stitches."

"Wow," Booth said, suddenly genuinely sympathetic for the man's anger. "I mean, you expect a car like that to be safe."

"That's damn right," Howard confirmed.

"Yeah, right," Booth acknowledged, deciding to slip in a little truth that Sweets and Bones would misinterpret. "I got a kid. If someone endangered his life, I'd kill the guy."

"Wait…" Howard said, looking at him with a new sense of shock. "Somebody killed this guy?"

"Killed him dead," Booth confirmed.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Howard said, calming down significantly now that he was aware of the reason he'd been called in. "Hey, look… I busted up his windshield, all right. I- I l-lost my temper. But there is no way I'm gonna let my kid live without a father."

Looking at Howard, Booth knew that the other man was telling the truth; doing something that would deprive his son of a parent was completely outside Howard's way of thinking.

He might have hated Newcomb, but he loved his son more, and Howard wouldn't let any thoughts of vengeance put his son in a position where he'd be deprived of a parent.

* * *

  
Walking into the strip club, Booth wondered why he always felt so uncomfortable in this kind of place. He acknowledged the fundamental appeal of the concept, but even when Angelus had been active and this kind of club was available his demon had preferred a private show of this nature rather than a public one, even if that was mainly because it made it easier for him to 'dispose' of the dancers afterwards. As Angel it just felt weird to watch that kind of thing when he knew he couldn't do more, and it just seemed tasteless to come to this sort of place as Booth no matter if he was single or dating.

"Hey, Bones, look, this is the only strip club in proximity to Alex's home and work, all right," he said, trying not to think about where they were more than he had to as he and his partner assessed the club. "You know what, you didn't have to come inside with me."

"No, I look forward to observing your behaviour," Bones said.

"My what?"

"Sweets says you're manipulative, like a salesman," Bones explained. "I want to study your technique."

"My technique?" Booth repeated, disturbed at the idea that anything he might have picked from Angelus might be worth studying even if he acknowledged its value. "Wait, I'm going to smack that guy."

"You put people at ease, get them to do your bidding," Bones explained. "It's a very useful skill. One I wish my father had passed on to me."

"All right, look, your father is a con man; I am not a con man, let's just remember that," Booth said, before his gaze settled on a group of strippers sitting in one corner. "OK, just watch; don't say anything."

With that, he walked over to the gathering in the corner, trying to picture them with more clothes on and this as a more conventional interrogation as he took a small tub out of his pocket. "Excuse me, ladies, uh, if I may, um, which one of you likes to use this stuff?"

"It's Strawberry Lust Dust," Bones added.

"Well, that would be me," one of the women said, a platinum blonde in a vivid red bikini. "Strawberry Lust."

"Right," Booth said. "Strawberry Lust. The one and only. I'm sure you thought long and hard about that stage name, right?"

"We'd like to speak with you in private," Bones put in.

"No, not in private, I could just ask you a few questions here," Booth cut in, turning awkwardly to his partner. "All right, Bones, you know what? It's a little weird that you're here watching why don't you just go outside…?"

"It's not weird, baby," Strawberry Lust said, walking up to gently lead him towards a nearby chair. "Lots of people like to watch."

"Oh, thank you," Bones said, clearly missing the point as per usual in this sort of situation. "I get tremendous satisfaction out of observing a whole variety of activities."

"I'd just like to ask you a couple of questions," Booth said.

"Your boyfriend's shy, isn't he?" the stripper smiled as she moved him down into the chair. "Sweet. That'll be sixty bucks."

"OK, I've got that," Bones said, handing the stripper the money. "Here you go."

"Thanks," the stripper said, smiling at Booth's discomfort even if she clearly misinterpreted his reasons for it. "Hey, relax; she's going to be enjoying this too."

"Right, just…" Booth said, suddenly silent as the woman's cleavage was virtually in his face; he'd prefer a bit of space before he started asking questions. "Whoa, all right."

"Not so interested in talking now, are you, baby?" the woman smiled.

"You have excellent control of your hips," Bones noted.

"So I've been told," Strawberry Lust grinned.

"Wh... Um, Miss Lust, um, Miss Lust, actually, I'm with the, uh, FBI," Booth cut in, holding up his badge before this could get any more awkward. "I need to ask you, um... few question about maybe a client?"

"FBI?" Strawberry Lust noted with a smile. "I'm a criminal science major at Georgetown."

"Yeah, and yet, here you are, right?" Booth said awkwardly. "Working off student loans?"

"You know it," Strawberry Lust grinned. "School's a fortune."

"Well, I think you will pay off your loans very quickly," Bones noted, smiling despite Booth's own indignation. "She's quite arousing, which I imagine translates into excellent tips."

"All right," Booth said, trying to get the focus back on the real reason they were here. "Miss Lust, um, Alex Newcomb, um, Criterion Cars, uh, salesman. Uh, maybe a client of yours?"

"Yeah, sure, regular," the younger woman confirmed. "What about him?"

"Well, we have evidence that you, um, gave him a lap dance on the night that he died."

"Died?" the woman repeated, which at least got her to stop gyrating, even if she sat down on his lap rather than a chair. "Whoa; murdered?"

"Can you just answer the, uh…?"

"Right, cooperate fully; I aced my freshman criminology class," 'Lust' said, taking a moment to think before she continued. "Um, I gave him a couple of dances Thursday night. He was pretty drunk. Started a fight and Billy had to kick him out. Wait... wait a minute; am I a suspect? Because all I do is gyrate and that never killed anyone."

"Did he get into a fight with one of the bouncers?" Booth asked, wanting to avoid that question.

"No, with another car guy," the stripper said. "You know, the Indian guy? Buddy?"

"From Criterion," Booth confirmed, relieved that he had a decent lead to show for this particularly awkward turn of events.

Now, if only he could get out of here without Bones making any more awkward observations about his instinctive response to Miss Lust…

* * *

  
"4.2 liter V8, carbon ceramic brakes with monobloc Brembo calipers," Buddy said from his position beside Booth as Booth took the car on his test drive.

"Zero to sixty?"

"4.6 seconds, but, uh… please, not during the test drive," Buddy smiled awkwardly.

"You married, Buddy?"

"Yes, indeed, bro," Buddy said, holding up his left hand to indicate the ring. "Four blissful years, but, uh, I know you must be a bachelor, because this car is for prowling."

"That's right," Booth said. "I am a bachelor. I do like to prowl. I usually head over to that, uh... that strip club, uh, Imperial Showgirls over on, uh, Washtenaw. You know, where they have all that lap dancing?"

"I-I don't know that place," Buddy said, his uncomfortable tone making it clear he was lying

"No?" Booth said, putting on the gas despite Buddy's protests, giving the car a few moments to pick up the pace; he might not be a vampire any more, but his reflexes were still sharp. "Imperial showgirls?"

"Uh, did my wife send you?" Buddy protested rapidly. "OK, please, I implore you to slow down. Uh, the railway tracks."

"What?" Booth asked nonchalantly.

"The railway tracks are there, and you must please slow down to five miles an hour before we-" Buddy began, just as Booth put his foot down on the accelerator. "OK, what do you need to know?"

"You got into a fight with Alex Newcomb at Imperial Showgirls the night he was murdered," Booth said firmly. "I want to know why."

"He stole a client from me; I punched him in the nose," Buddy said urgently. "Please, man, the tracks."

"How do I know you're not lying?" Booth asked.

"I'm not lying," Buddy said. "I'm not lying, I swear. I'm not lying. I'm not a liar. The tracks! The tracks! The tracks! The tracks! The tracks!"

With that said, Booth brought the car to a halt just short of the tracks; he would have cut it closer if he'd still been Angel, but he was pretty sharp on the draw even as Booth.

"Thank you, Agent Booth, thank you…" Buddy said, taking a moment to calm himself beoth Booth turned around and began to drive back along the road. "OK! We were both thrown out of the club, I foolishly drove home drunk, and I apologize, I won't do it again!"

"OK, what did Newcomb do?" Booth asked, maintaining his rapid pace as he weaved through the various turnings in this part of the street; he might not have his vampire-level reflexes, but he was still sharp enough to catch most of the corners around here.

"I don't know," Buddy began, as Booth stepped up the speed and kept on weaving around the road. "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait wait, wait, wait! Wait, wait! Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait! Wait, wait, wait. He, uh... he took a cab. He told the driver to... to-to-to take him back to Jungle Jim's. He said to me, 'Screw you and everyone who works at Criterion. I'm going to get my old job back'!"

"Right," Booth said, bringing the car to a stop and getting out of the car as he smiled nonchalantly at the other man. "You know what; this baby definitely pulls to the right. You have alignment problems. You know what, I'm going to call my partner and get a ride back."

It was a weird form of fun, but Booth liked the chance to conduct both an unconventional interrogation and prove that he was still very good at reacting on short notice when the situation called for it.

* * *

  
"You haven't said anything about my interrogation," Bones said, as the two of them finished sorting out payment for their post-case meal at the Founding Fathers.

"OK, you know what?" Booth said, glad to have something else to focus on beyond their more depressing case resolution. "You did great, OK, better than I thought."

"I was terrible," Bones said, smiling weakly. "Everybody's right; I lack empathy."

"You got empathy," Booth corrected; he'd seen people without empathy when he was Angelus- God, he'd actually _had_ no empathy back then- and his partner was far from lacking empathy. "You're awkward; that's different."

"My stuff is bones, yours is people."

"Right," Booth smiled at that assessment of their dynamic. "So you're admitting I'm better at something than you are?"

"No…" Bones began, before stopping herself as she took a moment to think. "Yes; a lot better."

"Thanks, Bones," Booth smiled, suddenly wondering how Bones would react if she knew about the days when Angle had been worse with people than even she was. "Hey; can we go now?"

"Yes," his partner smiled.

"Yeah, wait til you see what's outside," Booth smiled at the thought of Bones' reaction; he might not have bought the car, but he was going to enjoy giving it a few test-drives around the block before it had to go back.


	75. The Salt in the Wounds

"We last saw Ashley before her high school dance," Bob Clark said, as he and his wife spoke to Booth and Bones in their house, the couple surprisingly normal despite their daughter's considerable height.

"It was the end of winter dance," Ellen Clark added, as she sat down beside her husband with a cup of coffee. "I remember because we made a bunch of jam that day and Ashley was worried that she'd smell like raspberries."

"Ashley never made it to the dance?" Booth asked.

"We had to wait twenty-four hours before she was officially missing," Bob clarified as Ellen shook her head tearfully.

"Were there any major developments in your daughter's life in the weeks leading up to her death?"

"He means drugs," Ellen concluded. "Was Ashley doing drugs."

"No, we don't mean drugs," Bones cut in.

"No, no drugs," Booth affirmed. "Were you aware that your daughter was pregnant?"

"Approximately twelve weeks," Bones added.

"Pregnant?" Ellen said incredulously. "Ashley couldn't have been pregnant."

"She was," Bones said firmly. "Do you have any idea who might be the father?"

"Is that who you think killed her?" Bob asked. "The father of her child?"

"Well, we'd like to talk to him," Booth said, not wanting to get into the issue of possible suspects this early in a case.

"My daughter and I were very close, and it simply isn't possible that she wouldn't tell me she was pregnant," Ellen said firmly.

"I would appreciate some insight into the high number of injuries your daughter sustained since puberty," Bones cut in.

"So now you're saying that we abused our daughter?"

"It's alright, they have to ask," Bob said, calming his wife before turning back to Booth. "My daughter was an athlete. She grew… almost two feet over the last four years. You can confirm the injuries with her chiropractor."

"We are very sorry for your loss, sir," Booth said, handing the father his card.

"Then you shouldn't say such terrible things," Ellen said bluntly. Booth decided to ignore the fact that most of those 'terrible things' had been the result of her own misinterpretation; in his own experience, parents mourning a child wouldn't take criticism well.

* * *

  
"Come on in," Booth said, as Bob Clark knocked at his office door. "What can I do for you, Mr Clark?"

"I, uh, wanted to tell you that I suspected my daughter was pregnant," Bob said, his tone awkward as he entered the small room.

"Alright, have a seat," Booth said, the two men sitting down on either side of Booth's desk. "And you didn't want to say anything in front of your wife?"

"No," Bob confirmed. "I found a pregnancy test in the wastebasket in the bathroom."

"Your wife is still young enough to have children."

"Sexual intercourse has not been a part of our marriage in… several years."

"Did you talk to Ashley about the pregnancy test?" Booth asked, quickly moving on from that issue before it could get awkward.

"Yes, but she denied that it was hers," Bob elaborated. "She said it was a friend's. She asked me not to tell my wife. She called it a father/daughter secret."

"Was there a boy in Ashley's life?" Booth asked.

"Ashley argued about a boy with her friend Becca" Bob confirmed. "I overheard it on the phone. Didn't get a name."

"I see," Booth said. "Well, I'll look into it."

"Uh, I hope my wife doesn't have to find out that I kept this huge secret from her," Bob said as he got up. "I don't think she'd forgive me."

"Forgive you?" Booth repeated.

"Considering how it turned out…" Bob said, shrugging awkwardly as he left the room.

Booth had never had a daughter himself, but looking at Bob Clark now, he had to wonder if he'd have been as awkward about it as this man was. Things with Connor and Parker were sometimes awkward even when he had the chance to spend time with them outside of the broader chaos of his life, but at least he'd always felt like he might have some useful insight he could pass on to them; if he'd had a daughter, he would have had _serious_ trouble relating to them…

* * *

  
"Rory Davis?" Booth called out as they entered the high school weight room, filled with various young men on a wide range of equipment.

"Yeah?" a voice replied, identifying Davis as a young man in a sleeveless shirt bench-pressing weights while a slightly overweight kid acted as his spotter.

"Whoa, a little warning, dude, I'm only the Hulk when I get pissed," the slightly overweight kid said as he put the weights back.

"Listen," Booth focused on Rory, "we'd like to talk to you about Ashley Clark."

"It wasn't me," Rory said.

"It wasn't you who… what?" Bones asked.

"Becca texted me, saying that you think I killed Ashley, but I didn't," Rory clarified.

"Excuse me," Booth glanced at the other kid. "You wanna give me a moment here? I'd like to talk to him alone."

"Dude, you're a murder suspect!" the kid grinned at Rory. "That's awesome!"

Booth cleared his throat in a very pointed manner and the kid moved away, leaving them with Rory (Booth had to wonder why anyone could think that being a murder suspect was awesome; as he recalled, the Scoobies had been particularly unnerved at just the idea that there might be a human murderer in Sunnydale even after all the demons they'd killed).

"Becca said that you and Ashley connected sexually," Bones inquired.

"Yeah," Booth added. "Her exact words were 'got all over'."

"This is completely not fair," Rory said, as he walked over to get a towel.

"That you had sex with two girls and they got pregnant?" Bones asked.

"We didn't have sex!" Rory protested.

"Pregnancy is unlikely without intercourse," Bones whispered over at him.

"Right," Booth said, wondering why his partner honestly thought he needed that bit of information. "Thanks for the tip, Bones, yeah."

"No, we didn't have intercourse," Rory affirmed. "I'm a Christian, I'm not gonna have intercourse until I'm married."

"OK," Booth said, deciding to tackle that alibi later; the concept of someone being that devout in this day and age was unlikely, but he wasn't going to call it impossible. "So you got two girls pregnant, but you didn't have sex with either one of them?"

"Well…" Rory said, clearly uncomfortable at the story he was about to tell. "I think some of, uh, my...you know… _stuff_ may have found its way in there. I mean, the way Ashley came after me, it's like she was really, really...trying…"

"To get your sperm?" Bones finished.

"Yeah, well," Rory noted, "if it wasn't for my faith in Jesus, there would have been sexual intercourse."

"How did your relationship with Ashley end?" Booth asked.

"Bad," Rory said simply. "Ashley was mad at me. Becca was mad at me. I did everything right, and it turned out all wrong."

"Mmm," Booth mused; the young man seemed honest enough, but he would need to look into that anyway. "Did Ashley have any arguments with anyone else?"

"Or try to get their sperm?" Bones inquired.

"She had some sort of fight with Mr Hawthorne," Rory noted. "I heard it from the weight room."

"Who's Mr Hawthorne?"

"He's the volleyball coach."

"Where would he be?" Booth asked; alibis could be checked out later, but if he had a fresh suspect, he was going to follow that up as quickly as possible.

* * *

  
"Ashley needed $5000 to leave home and raise her baby, so she tries to blackmail her coach," Booth reflected, assessing the case one last time as he and Brennen had their post-case drinks in the Founding Fathers.

"But it didn't work, because he'd never had sex with her," Bones finished.

"Right," Booth confirmed. "So she has to go and seduce the chiropractor and threatens him with statutory rape if he doesn't pay up."

"And he killed her."

"Horrible," Booth said grimly.

"So, are the rest of the girls still renting a house together?"

"Right," Booth noted. "You know what I don't get? How is it that eight beautiful girls could just give up their whole lives during high school?"

"It's a rational decision," Bones shrugged.

"On what planet?" Booth asked; he couldn't imagine Buffy or Willow making that kind of decision, and Cordelia and Harmony would have completely freaked out at the very idea of getting knocked up at that point in their lives (he couldn't conclusively say the same thing for Fred, but he thought she would have had a similar view).

"Earth!"

"Earth?"

"Given the current environment, the paradigm within which a group of girls band together to raise their offspring has merit," Bones noted.

"Without their fathers?" Booth asked. He might not always have gotten along with his father, but it wasn't like he'd never appreciated the man's willingness to try even if it had eventually been overshadowed by his frustration at the man for not doing much to improve their lot, to say nothing of his own efforts to be there for Parker.

Besides, one-parent families just made him think of his relationship with his vampire children, and even if he'd 'succeeded' from a vampire perspective, from a human perspective, he'd completely ruined Drusilla and Penn's chances to be anything more than psychopaths.

"Anthropologically speaking, those girls have grown up in a culture that reinforces the sad truism that women cannot count on men."

"Don't say 'men' like that," Booth said firmly. "Men do not like a world without responsibility."

He might have never asked to be a father, and Buffy and Wesley's fathers were far from perfect examples- he didn't know enough about Xander, Willow or Cordelia's parents to have an opinion on them one way or the other- but he'd done his best with Connor, he had to respect that Holtz had done his best in a terrible environment even if it had been focused on hating him, and Giles had never had any issue with acting as a father to the Scoobies apart from his later concerns that he was holding Buffy back…

"That boy whom these young girls chose as their sperm donor, he seemed more than happy with the arrangement," Bones noted, cutting off Booth's train of thought.

As much as he hated to admit it, his partner made a point; Clinton Gilmour hadn't shown much interest in taking any responsibility for his fatherhood… which meant that he needed to give that kid a few pointers on responsibility before he got the wrong idea about anything.

He'd taken responsibility for Connor when he had learned that he had become a father despite being completely unprepared for the possibility, but even if the potential consequences weren't as serious in this instance, he was going to make sure this boy understood what could be…

* * *

  
"Why did the chiropractor kill Ashley?" Clinton asked, sitting opposite Booth in the Royal Diner.

"Well, Ashley seduced him and tried to blackmail him."

"So he murdered her?" Clinton asked, clearly shaken at that news. "Dude."

"Yeah," Booth said, giving the boy a moment to process that news before he spoke again. "You know, Ashley needed money to raise her baby. Your baby."

"You didn't think those girls would have sex with me because I can't bench press enough," Clinton smiled.

"DNA tests," Booth chuckled, going along with the boy's immediate impression of the situation. "They prove I was wrong, so… yeah, I owe you an apology."

"I did; I told you," Clinton grinned.

"Yeah," Booth said, remembering the days when he'd been Clinton's age; he'd 'officially' had more responsibility than Clinton, but he'd also enjoyed the freedom of it more than he really should have. "You know what? You are a smart kid."

"I know."

"But you're also a real smart-ass kid," Booth said, before Clinton could get too big-headed about the compliment. "There's something I want you to think about, alright? Sex is never free and easy."

"I beg to differ," Clinton began.

"Because the fact is," Booth said, taking out the photographs he'd collected from his office and assessing them to confirm he had the faces right, "any one of these girls, they could change their mind, and you would be paying child support for the rest of your life."

"Wait; what?" Clinton asked, shaken at that news.

"You see these four girls right here?" Booth said, laying out photos of four girls in volleyball uniforms on the table between him and Clinton. "You are responsible for bringing their children into the world. Whether they think so or not, they are _your_ responsibility. Your children, your responsibility, do you understand? And what you do about that will define the kind of man you are."

"No, no, hold on a second-" Clinton began, clearing uncomfortable at the idea.

"But if you ignore that- ignore your children- that's exactly what you're going to become," Booth said, his gaze fixed on Clinton as he picked out the photo of Ashley. "A loser. A deadbeat. For the rest of your life. You know what, there's something else that you should think about. Ashley Clark? She was going to have your baby. According to our pathologist, it was gonna be a boy."

"A boy?" Clinton repeated, after a moment of silence.

"Mmm," Booth confirmed, as he ripped up the photo of Ashley, leaving her head on display. "A son who died… with his mother."

"What did you have to tell me all that for?" Clinton asked, his tone shaking and the hint of tears in his eyes.

"Because you needed to hear it," Booth said. "Do you understand?"

"Yes," Clinton said, nodding awkwardly.

The kid needed time to process what he'd just been told, but Booth had faith that Clinton would make the right call.

In a way, Clinton reminded Booth of Xander; they both didn't look for responsibility, but he had to have faith that, like Xander, Clinton had the potential to take charge when he recognised what he had to do.

He wasn't going to start poking his nose into the boy's future life to make sure he was doing what Booth had told him to do, but he'd made a statement and had to have faith that Clinton would make the right call.


	76. The Doctor in the Den

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I went against my usual ‘routine’ and included an original scene at the end; since the Michelle sub-plot was the biggest development in this episode, I thought its resolution deserved more explicit acknowledgement from Booth, even if we never saw it on-screen

"I was here last weekend with Parker," Booth noted, as the two of them drove through the wildlife park where their latest victim had been discovered. "They got monkeys swinging free, right over there; do you think we have time?"

"Booth, we're here to recover a set of remains," Bones said, as their jeep was waved through the entrance.

"Come on, Bones," Booth smiled encouragingly at this partner. "You gotta take time to smell the primates."

"Why?" Bones asked. "They are malodorous and they throw their excrement."

Booth decided not to press the issue; if his partner didn't get the appeal of animals, this wasn't the time to try and make her get why people liked them. As they approached the tiger enclosure, Booth briefly hoped that this animal wouldn't have to be put down because it had been eating the body; tigers were rare enough that the last thing he wanted was for another one to be lost because the animal had been used as a disposal site.

"Who wanders around in an animal park?" he asked, noting the tiger in a cage with various FBI agents gathered around it.

"Someone with extremely poor judgement," Bones noted, as they reached an already-skeletal body with just a few strips of flesh left on it.

"Guess no-one told this guy it's not a petting zoo," Booth smiled, only to receive a glare from his partner. "Never mind."

"Flesh has been gnawed and baked in the sun," Bones mused, kneeling down to examine the remains, "but the nasal root suggests a black male, over six feet tall."

"According to, uh, Parker's big book of animals," Booth noted, glancing over at the animal in question, "they can pounce at thirty-five miles an hour and leap thirty feet."

"The tiger fed on the flesh and internal organs before he started cleaning the bones," his partner continued.

"You know," Booth mused, wondering if he was about to get a case that actually had an innocent explanation, "I'm thinking the victim wandered away from his car, he was drunk, and he ended up in this area. Same thing happened to a guy last year in the giraffe section."

"Giraffes are herbivores," Bones noted. "They don't eat people."

"That part is different; the guy broke his arm," Booth clarified. "Did you know that giraffes can weigh up to two tons?"

"Yes; everyone knows that," Bones added (Booth sometimes wondered about his partner; there were times when she didn't even seem to acknowledge that not everyone knew what she did about non-bone-related matters, even if she recognised her expertise in bone matters).

"And they sleep less than two hours a day."

"That I did not know," Bones admitted, which at least answered Booth's concern about her acknowledging her shortcomings.

"Yeah; Pinky stumps the brain," Booth smiled.

"Well, I have no way of determining cause of death out here," Bones said, standing up and taking off her gloves. "So we should pack everything up and bring it back to the lab."

As Booth called out to the team to bring the remains together, he suddenly wondered how long it would take his partner to collect herself if she was ever exposed to a demon's corpse; would she accept it as non-human, or conduct her analysis based on the assumption that it was so long as the skeleton seemed right?

* * *

  
"So," Booth looked awkwardly at Cam as they sat in the lab's lounge area, strangely lost about what to say to someone he'd known for years in a situation he'd faced as both Booth and Angel, "I called the hospital and Doctor Welton has been missing for two days. I'm sorry, Cam."

"I haven't even seen Andrew for ten years," Cam sniffed, dabbing at her eyes. "It's silly for me to be reacting like this."

"No, it's not," Booth said; if it was Buffy on that table, or even someone more removed like Giles or Xander, he didn't think he'd be able to keep himself completely together any more than Cam was right now. "You know what, it was a big part of your life."

"What about his daughter?" Cam asked. "Who's going to tell Michelle? Has he remarried?"

"No," Booth said. "No other family."

"Yeah, I'm not surprised," Cam noted. "Michelle's mom died during childbirth; I don't think Andrew could ever go through loving anyone like that again. Michelle became everything to him."

"She must be… what, sixteen now?" Booth asked, hoping he remembered the relevant stories correctly amid his other 'new' memories.

"Yeah," Cam nodded. "What a terrible time to lose her father."

"Look," Booth began awkwardly, "Bones and I will get the social worker-"

"No, no social worker," Cam cut in. "If there's no one else, I have to do it. I'll talk to her."

"Cam, it's been ten years since you've seen her-"

"I was her mom for almost two years, Seeley," Cam said firmly despite the tremor in her voice. "She should hear it from someone… someone who loved her father."

Looking at Cam's firm resolve to face a reminder of what would have to be a difficult memory from her past, Booth wondered if he could ever be that brave when confronted by his past like this. Facing Michelle might be easier than facing any of the Scoobies might be, as at least Michelle would have always known that Cam was alive; if he ever had to report the death of one of his old friends as Angel to the survivors, how would any of them react?

* * *

  
"She told me she never wanted kids," Bones noted, as the two of them sat in the car outside the Welton house.

"Maybe Michelle is the reason," Booth noted.

"I don't understand."

"She loved Welton and lived with him for about two years and she raised Michelle like she was her own," Booth explained. "And then she's been alone for all that time because she doesn't want to put herself in that position again."

"But that was ten years ago," Bones said, uncertainly.

"For Cam there are emotional considerations here," Booth elaborated. "That's why she has to be involved in the case."

"With us?"

"It's best that you… stay in the lab a little bit more," Booth noted. "Just this time around."

"Because that's where I'm most useful," Bones finished for him. "I understand; you and Cam can rely on your statistically inaccurate guts to solve the case."

"She needs this," Booth said, not wanting to rise to his partner's misinterpretation. "Just trust me on this, Bones."

He was fully aware that this was bending the rules, but he'd developed enough of a reputation as Booth to get away with that kind of thing these days, and he'd done it all the time when he was Angel…

* * *

  
"So, uh, tell me about Doctor Welton," Booth asked, thoughtfully studying Richard Annenburg as the young man sat in the interrogation room; compared to his mother's simple arrogance, Richard seemed to be more self-effacing.

"He was a… good man," Richard said. "A good doctor. It's terrible what happened to him."

"I heard he made the mistake of getting between you and something you've been working for your whole life."

"My mother tell you that?" Richard asked with a slight smile.

"She said you wanted to be a doctor," Booth noted.

"She's right," Richard smiled.

"Roosevelt's got some of the best residencies," Booth mused, his voice low. "I can see why you wouldn't want anything to get in your way."

"What does that mean?" Richard asked, the kid suddenly uncertain.

"Well, you see," Booth explained, "the suspect that we're looking for had motive, opportunity and a medical background. Does that sound like anyone in this room?"

"You think I killed Doctor Welton?" Richard asked. "I want to save lives, Agent Booth, that's why I'm a doctor."

"Someone tried to save Doctor Welton," Booth noted, giving Richard the potential explanation of an emotional outburst and subsequent panic. "You know, they tried to stop the bleeding after they attacked him."

"I didn't even want the residency," Richard countered. "I begged Doctor Welton to reject me."

"After all that hard work?" Booth asked. "Now why would you do something like that?"

"To get away from my mother," Richard sighed. "She seems all benevolent, but she's a control freak, and Doctor Welton, he understood that I had to get away from her to be the kind of doctor I wanted to be."

"So he stood up for you, even though he might lose his job?" Booth asked, even as he appreciated the boy's reasoning; he'd certainly had a rough enough time facing his father's expectations back when he was Liam, and at least Richard had the advantage that he clearly had a plan for his life where Liam just hadn't liked his father's plans.

"Yeah," Richard nodded. "Look, you don't have to believe me. If somebody tried to stop the bleeding, then they'd be covered in blood themselves. Take my clothes. You can run all the tests you want."

The way he brought up that topic rather than trying to ask for a lawyer helped Booth make up his mind about the boy; Richard's motives for rejecting the application might be complicated, but he doubted that the boy was a murderer.

* * *

  
"When I was talking with Ang and Brennan last night about men, it occurred to me that Andrew probably didn't change much when it came to women," Cam noted, as she walked with Booth to the meeting room.

"Come on, it's been ten years," Booth noted, even as he noted that he wasn't in a position to discuss routine when he'd spent years moving around as Angel unable to form any kind of dynamic. "You think Andrew was still visiting the same place?"

"Andrew was set in his routines and if I remember Langston correctly, this guy didn't miss a thing," Cam explained, as the two of them entered the meeting room with the small man in rumpled clothing. "Hiya, Lanston."

"I know you," the man said, smiling at Cam.

"It's been a while," Cam noted as she sat at the end of the table.

"Three-zero-one," Langston continued. "Wednesday afternoons with Doctor Welton. Noisy afternoons. You always left smiling."

"Hey," Booth said; he and Cam hadn't been a couple for over two years, but hearing a friend discussed in that manner still wasn't a comfortable topic.

"You were a nurse at the hospital," Langston smiled.

"She was a doctor, OK," Booth corrected. "And now she's a Federal Coroner. So a little respect, okay, Rumpelstiltskin?"

"Coroner, huh?" Langston asked. "Somebody die?"

"Yeah, Langston," Cam nodded. "Doctor Welton."

"My bet, a jealous husband," Langston shrugged. "Or a jealous ex, maybe."

"You're wearing on me, sport," Booth said, not wanting to hear this man's own theories when he didn't strike Booth as a man with a high opinion of women anyway.

"I'm gonna guess that Andrew kept coming to your motel after me," Cam said.

"Uh, yep, he kept coming," Langston nodded.

"With anyone special?"

"I don't know her name," Langston clarified.

"Describe her, then," Cam said firmly, evidently just as uncomfortable with this topic as Booth was.

"Good looking, like all of you," Langston shrugged thoughtfully. "Uh, tall. He liked them tall. Pretty face, sharp features. And red hair."

"Red hair?" Cam said, in a tone that suggested a key item of evidence had fallen into place in her mind.

* * *

  
"She's taking Michelle in?" Bones looked at Booth in surprise as they exchanged their post-case drinks at the Founding Fathers.

"Like I said, Michelle was a big part of her life," Booth noted. "She had a choice, and she chose not to let Michelle just get… lost in the system."

"I don't disapprove of the decision, I'm just surprised at how quickly it was made," Bones clarified. "Considering that there are still relatives of Michelle's father to consider, I would have assumed courts would be more in favour of a biologically-connected carer."

"Well, that's the advantage of knowing people in the legal business, Bones," Booth noted with a slight smile. "We can streamline things when we have to."

For a moment, his partner looked thoughtfully at her drink, before she smiled and nodded at him.

"Good," she said, looking back at Booth with a smile. "Considering how Cam looked at that shaker set, I… well…"

"She told you about that, huh?" Booth smiled at her, remembering the time he'd found that shaker while he and Cam were dating and wondered where the other one had gone. "Yeah, it's funny the things we share with kids; I talked someone into letting Parker keep his Visitor Pass from that time he came to my office over Christmas so that he'd have a more physical reminder of me."

"That seems like an… odd gift," Bones noted.

"It's the principle of the thing, Bones. The point is we all have different things that make us think of the past; you've got dolphins for your mom, that sort of thing."

He had a few more personal mementos of his old family, but it would be harder to reference specific examples of his time as Angel without his partner wondering about the significance of a long black leather coat, to say nothing of a couple of the swords he'd picked up from those days.

"And hey," he grinned at his partner, "on the bright side, Michelle's far enough along that all she really needs from Cam is support and a place to live; once they get past the initial stages, Cam gets the emotional benefits without too many of the issues."

It was an unconventional way to become a parent, but at least Cam had a more legitimate reason for missing so much of the child's life than his own temporal mess with Connor's upbringing.


	77. The Science in the Physicist

"OK, so what's it look like to you?" Booth asked, as his partner examined their latest crime scene, in the form of a human ear lying near a bag containing what was probably the rest of the body even if it had bene reduced to mulch.

"An ear," Bones noted.

"Did you just make a joke?"

"No."

"'Cause that wouldn't be like you."

"I didn't," Bones confirmed simply. "It looks like an ear."

"What do you make of the stuff in the blue bag then?" Booth asked, deciding to leave that topic for a more private occasion as he indicated the rest of the assorted mulch in the bag close to the ear.

"It looks like chili con carne," Bones noted.

"Could this be the rest of the person who lost the ear?" Booth speculated; he'd seen some gruesome deaths in his time as a vampire, but he couldn't recall anything that could turn someone to mulch like that.

"I don't know," Bones replied. "It looks like chili con carne. There's no single piece here bigger than the skull of an australopithecus."

"Sports terms, Bones; remember, we talked about this," Booth asked his partner, smiling as Bones demonstrated a size with her hands. "Ah, softball. Good, you're getting better; size of a softball."

"At first guess, the total mass in this garbage bag does not add up to an entire human being," Bones noted as Booth jotted down the details in his notebook.

"Right," Booth said, deciding not to question how she could determine something like that at a visual glance. "I'll just get forensics to scour the entire lot."

"Yes."

"Hey," Booth added, leaning over to address his partner with a whisper, "would you even want to guess what happened to this human being?"

"No," the anthropologist said simply.

"I knew you'd say that; I just had to ask," Booth said, standing straight up to address the rest of the team. "Alright, let's scour it up."

Whatever had just happened to this body was completely disgusting, but it should be academically interesting to work out what had caused it.

* * *

  
"So you think the piece of meteor we found in the murder victim came from this?" Booth asked, studying the meteor in the lobby of the Collar Institute for Physics Research; science was always Fred's thing more than him, but it was still nice to be reminded of his old friend, no matter how tragically things had ended.

"Yeah, it's an exact match," Bones confirmed, studying the large black rock. "The sillicate oxite ratios are indistinguishable. Well, you've heard of Landis Collar, right?"

"Sure I have," Booth nodded, knowing that his partner would probably guess he'd just done his research last-minute once they identified the institute's involvement but wanting to give it a shot anyway. "Blind guy; world's leading expert in super-conductivity."

"Do you even know what super-conductivity is?"

"I know it's better than normal conductivity."

"Agent Booth, Doctor Brennan," a young man said, walking up to them, dressed in a surprisingly casual T-shirt and shorts despite the institute's reputation. "I'm Christopher Beaudette, senior scholar here at the Collar. Shall we?"

"Yes," Booth said, nodding as they followed the young man. "So you work in super-conductivity?"

"Uh, no, Agent Booth," Beaudette corrected. "I'm doing research into generating power from earthquakes."

"Groundbreaking," Booth said.

"That was a funny joke," Bones laughed, in a manner that would have been sarcastic from anyone else.

"Yeah," Beaudette said sarcastically. "One I've never ever heard before."

"Are these people here smarter than you?" Booth glanced over at his partner, suddenly struck by the idea of a socially aware Bones.

"That would depend on how one defines intelligence," another man said, walking up to join them, large dark glasses over a casual blue suit and a high forehead with surprisingly long hair. "I'm Landis Collar. Thank you, Christopher."

"Landis," Beaudette said, as he left the group

"I'm Special Agent Seeley Booth," Booth said, suddenly struck by the memories of Vanessa Brewer as he took in Collar's glasses and cane, even as he forced them aside; there was no reason for a respected scientistto be that kind of psycho. "This here is, uh…"

"Doctor Temperance Brennan," Collar finished.

"Is that clicking noise attacked to your blindness, Doctor Collar?" Bones asked.

"Yes," Collar explained, demonstrating by reaching out to place a hand directly on the anthropologist's arm. "Prototype Sonic Echo Locator; it allows me to apprehend my surroundings. Have you forgiven me?"

"Forgiven him?" Booth repeated in confusion.

"I was turned down for a fellowship here at the institute," Bones clarified with a smile.

"No, no, that is not true," Collar corrected. "Your anthropological research was rejected because it looked to the past, not the future. _Ad etierno ad glorium ad posterus_."

"To eternity, to glory, to the future," Bones translated.

"Right," Booth said, resisting the temptation to say that he'd understood that anyway; once again, Booth's knowledge had to be adjusted to reflect what Booth wouldn't know even if Angel had learned about it. "Then why say your motto in a dead, ancient language?"

"OK, Booth," Bones said, clearly ignoring the question.

"How can I help?" Collar asked.

"Uh, this," Booth said, taking out the evidence bag with the meteorite fragment in it as he was suddenly struck by the awkwardness of talking to a blind man about this. "If you put your hand out, I'll… here you go."

"What Agent Booth has given you is-" Bones began.

"I know what it is," Collar said, his fingers studying the fragment in his hand. "It's a piece of my meteorite."

"That's impressive for a blind man," Booth noted.

"I know because I had it made for Diane."

"Diane?" Booth asked, quickly considering the implications of a possible suspect identified this early.

"Doctor Diane Sidman, my fiancé," Collar explained. "The meteorite was set in her engagement ring."

"Well, that would explain the gold flecks," Bones noted.

"What's happened?" Collar asked urgently. "Is Diane all right?"

"When was the last time you saw Diane?" Booth asked automatically, grateful when Collar showed no sign that he cared about the poor choice of words.

"A few days ago," the scientist replied promptly. "She was ill, which is understandable considering the pressure she's under."

"Pressure?" Booth asked curiously.

"She's editor-in-chief of the Collar Journal, perhaps the most important venue for scientific publishing in the world," Collar clarified, 'looking' over in Bones's direction. "Please, what has happened?"

"We have discovered some human remains which contain what is most certainly your fiance's engagement ring," Bones explained awkwardly.

Taking that in, Collar looked down and turned on his sonic locator, walking over to a bench to sit down.

"We'd like to talk to anyone who may have interacted with Diane before she disappeared," Booth put in, wanting to get back to the case.

"You must speak with Diane's students, chief among them Jennifer Keating and Milton Alvaredo," Collar said, standing up and returning the piece to Booth. "I'll have Doctor Beaudette bring them to you; if you need anything else, I'll be in my office."

As grateful as he was to be away from the reminders of Vanessa Brewer, Booth suddenly found himself wondering about that guy; he just seemed far too casual for someone who'd just been told that the woman he was going to marry was dead.

* * *

  
Taking in Sidman's work area, Booth suddenly found himself put out at the reminder of Fred's bad period; he appreciated that he was probably exaggerating the scale of the issue, but all these equations scrawled over glass boards reminded him of Fred's room immediately after they'd brought her back from Pylea…

"As requested," Collar said, leading the way through the boards to the desk that was the only other furniture in the room. "Diane's work area."

"Whoa," Booth said. "Looks like somebody cleaned it out."

"Oh, no, Booth," his partner informed him. "Doctor Sidman was a theoretical physicist. She didn't do experiments; she figured everything out through equations."

Privately, Booth suddenly wondered if that had been Fred's 'official' field; she'd branched out in so many ways after she'd joined the team that he'd never really thought about what her original career path had been before Pylea, and that was before he took into account how she'd used her knowledge of magic and science to understand those portals she'd opened.

"Diane was a member of the Large Hadron Collider team," Collar noted as h removed his glasses.

"Isn't that that thing in Europe that's going to create a black hole and end the universe?" Booth asked (Fred had discussed some theories on that issue based on her own expertise in dimensional portals, but he couldn't remember the specifics after this long).

"There's only a very small chance of that actually occurring," Bones cut in.

"And yet Diane received a number of death threats," Collar continued.

"Diane Sidman's role was important to the Large Hadron Collider Team?" Bones asked.

"The effort to find the Higgs-Boson will be set back months," Collar said firmly.

"The God Particle?" Bones asked.

"What's that?" Booth asked, suddenly struck by the image of someone managing to somehow Jasmine or that 'Glory' woman he'd heard about from Willow and trying to dissect them to get a DNA sample or something.

"Uh, theoretical particle which explains why matter has mass," Collar answered.

"Mass and matter aren't the same?" Booth asked, privately wondering how that 'god particle' would account for magic and everything else that had been part of his life as Angel before he registered how the two scientists were glancing at each other. "Oh, come on, don't look at each other like that; I bet neither one of you know how to make your own beer."

"You realise you just said 'don't look at each other' to a blind man?" Bones asked with a restrained smile.

"You have records of the threats made against her?" Booth said, deciding to get this chat back to the investigation before he embarrassed himself any further.

"Yes; ever since one of our scientists was attacked for his work in cloning."

"Milton Alvaredo suggested that we look at whomever was going to replace Diane Sidman as editor-in-chief," Bones noted.

"That would be the senior scholar, Chirstopher Beaudette," Collar clarified.

"You can understand how that makes him a prime suspect," Bones asked.

"I'll tell Sweets to look into the threats to see if they're worth following up," Booth noted as he turned to leave the lab.

"If it matters," Collar cut in, "Diane and Christopher were also enjoying a sexual relationship."

"Whoa," Booth said, looking incredulously at the blind man, wishing his partner looked more shocked at that revelation than she did. "If it matters? I thought you were going to marry her?"

"At which time, by mutual agreement, Diane and Christopher's sexual relationship was to cease," Collar clarified.

"Completely rational," Bones said.

"Except for the completely insane part where somebody killed Diane Sidman," Booth said grimly.

He had to wonder what it was about the modern world where people considered it perfectly rational to sleep with pretty much anyone no matter what kind of personal commitments they were meant to be making to other people. Angelus might have enjoyed psychological torment, but he'd never been able to make anyone cheat on their partners unless the relationships were already in trouble before he got there…

_Seriously, when did people become so nonchalant about what should be the most important relationships in their lives?_

* * *

  
"You know," Booth noted, sitting against the wall while Bones paced the hallway outside the office, "most people, you bust in on having sex with a gun, you know, it kinda disrupts the mood."

"Perhaps they decided to start all over again from the beginning," Bones noted, leaning against the wall to join him, laughing at the idea. "It's just sex, Booth."

"It's not that," Booth corrected. "Look, I'm not a prude."

"Well… you have what they would call hang-ups," Bones said.

"You know that guy Landis?" Booth asked, after glancing around to make sure nobody else was in the corridor, wanting to make his point without having to explain his discomfort to any more of these 'rational' people.

"Yes?"

"He's about to make a move on you."

"How do you know?"

"Because it is the rational and smart thing to do and he is all about that," Booth said, his tone low. "I see how he looks at you."

"How he looks at me?" Bones smiled. "He's blind."

"It's too literal, Bones," Booth said, not wanting to get bogged down in such a minor detail. "His fiancé was just murdered and he's already moving on."

"Well, she's gone," Bones said nonchalantly. "He has accepted it."

"Look," Booth said, feeling a new need to make his partner understand his perspective, "good people, they leave marks on each other. The least we could do is let them fade away naturally, not, you know, scrape them off, or paint over them with new marks."

He might not be able to explain the truth to Bones, but he had his experiences of his relationships with Buffy and Cordelia in particular to draw on; he had loved them both at different times in his life, but just because he had fallen for Cordelia didn't mean that he had completely stopped loving Buffy, and he certainly hadn't gone from Buffy to Cordelia immediately.

"So you're not a prude?"

"Moi?" Booth laughed, standing up to do a little dance to escape the emotionally tense nature of the earlier conversation. "Hey, I am a very fun and very sexy guy; that's right."

"So you just think that if two people care about each other they leave metaphorical marks which should be allowed to fade naturally?" Bones asked, standing up to look at him more directly.

"You heard me but you just didn't understand me," Booth mused, wishing that he could be sure his partner had appreciated the emotional nature of his last speech.

"I wonder that about you all the time," the anthropologist replied nonchalantly.

Booth was almost grateful that Jennifer came out to disrupt the moment before it could get any more awkward; he had no idea how he could explain this in a manner that Doctor Temperance Brennan would understand without getting into some emotional stuff that he _really_ didn't want to discuss right now…

* * *

  
"So Diane Sidman agreed to publish Milton Alvaredo only if he shared credit with her?" Bones asked, looking at him as they sat at the bar.

"Right," Booth nodded while going over the payment for the drinks. "So she said that he was using his theories about that God particles-"

"Particle," Bones corrected. "There's only one."

"Right," Booth said, wondering if that actually applied when he could think of several valid genuine gods. "Particle to vibrate the pond scum."

"He gives her cancer, but she lives too long," Bones added.

"Wow," Booth said, amazed that some people could be so eager for another person to die even if they knew that it was going to happen soon. "Then he kills her with a pencil and feeds her to crows so he doesn't have to share credit. Wow, that is cold."

"And creepy?" Bones asked.

"I didn't mean to call you creepy," Booth said, registering the implications of that on top of his earlier comments during this case.

"You said I have a creepy mode."

"I apologise," Booth said. "OK, look, I wasn't in my element."

"What?" Bones asked. "Every element is your element."

"No, that is not true," Booth said, sighing awkwardly before he decided that admitting to his fears was one thing that he had to face as Booth rather than as Angel. "OK, listen… we just got to stop hanging out with geniuses because you're going to figure out that I'm really stupid."

"What?" Bones said as Booth took a sip of his beer. "Don't worry about that; I figured out a long time ago how stupid you are."

Booth was lost for anything to say to that; he understood that he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed at the Jeffersonian, given everyone else's multiple qualifications and self-taught skills, but having it thrown in his ace like that hurt on a deeper level…

"What I just said is true and yet it really sounded wrong," Bones noted, at least having the decency to sound embarrassed at that statement. "What I should say is I don't care how stupid you are… it's not any better?"

"No," Booth said, wanting to keep it simple. "No, not at all."

"Well," Bones continued, as Sweets, Angela and Vincent Nigel-Murray came in to sit around the other two, "there is intelligence that I have and Mr. Nigel-Murray has."

"Oh, thank you," the English intern smiled briefly as he sat down beside Booth.

"And… Sweets," Bones added. "Even though his is so misdirected as to be meaningless."

"Right," Booth said.

"Wow," Sweets noted. "Backhand full of knuckles with that compliment."

"And Hodgins, and Angela… not so much, but she's very talented."

"Thank you very much," Angela said in a lightly sarcastic tone.

"You're welcome," Bones said, not picking up on the particular nature of that observation as she turned back to Booth. "But then there's another quality which is the ability to use intelligence. That is what you have."

For a moment, Booth considered that statement, and finally decided to just accept it as a compliment and not over-analyse it; the last time he'd allowed himself to become consumed by what his friends thought about his intelligence, the personality that would become Jasmine had tricked him into agreeing to have his soul extracted.

"Thanks, Bones," he smiled at her.

Of course, Angela had to kill the moment when she asked where Hodgins was, but Booth remembered some of the things he'd heard recently about Angela's father being back in town and some of the stories he'd picked up from Angela about the man over the years; he doubted Hodgins was in _serious_ trouble right now…


	78. The Cinderella in the Cupboard

"All right, let's go everybody," Booth yelled as he walked through the garbage dump where their latest body had been discovered, moving past the curious workers as they tried to look at the body, uttering the usual platitudes as he ducked under the crime scene tape while police officers ordered the workers to stay back. He briefly wondered what about this crime scene prompted so much attention, but then he saw the subject of this investigation; the bloody imprint of a human being on a large collection of cardboard.

"Whoa," he said, making the sign of the cross automatically as Booth's own memories 'took precedence' (Those moments when he did something Booth would have done rather than him still weirded him out at times, but he'd come to accept them). "It's the Virgin Mary."

"Have you googled the grilled cheese Jesus?" Cam asked, putting her equipment down beside her. "'Cause that was just a faulty griddle."

"We're here because someone suspected a crime, Booth," Bones said sceptically.

"Oh, I'm just saying, life is a lot more than what you can cook up in your chemistry sets," Booth countered, wishing not for the first time that he could give his partner more examples from his own personal history. "Miracles do happen, Bones."

"Well, religious visions are nothing but pareidolia, random stimulus being perceived as significant," Bones said firmly as she studied the cardboard packaging.

"Oh yeah," Booth said, briefly wishing that he could cite Doyle and Cordelia as examples of actual visions before deciding it wasn't worth trying to present an obscure argument for his partner. "Did you ever hear of the Shroud of Turin, Dr. Burn-In-Hell?"

"Sorry, big guy," Cam noted. "That was debunked twenty years ago; carbon dating doesn't lie."

"Neither does phenolphthalein," Bones said as she held up a pink cotton pad, saving Booth the trouble of having to argue the Shroud issue when he wasn't that clear on some of the fine details of his alleged religion. "This was not a miracle; it's dried blood."

"Oh, all right," Booth said, as two other officers began to move the packed cardboard to the floor. "Let's get this bale of hay down; come on… all right, here we go; don't got all day; there you go."

"All right," Cam said, as Booth took a pair of shears to cut the wiring holding the cardboard together, "let's do it."

As the two Jeffersonian staff members carefully took the cardboard apart, it was soon easy to confirm that there was a dead body underneath everything. Even by the Jeffersonian's usual standards, the abundance of blood and the flattened skull made it particularly messy, but at least he didn't have to worry about Bones or the others finding out about the supernatural for this case.

He still wasn't entirely sure how someone could end up here in that state, but at least it seemed plausible…

* * *

  
"Like I said on the phone," Doctor Marcus Scheer said, the plastic surgeon standing nonchalantly in Booth's office as he examined the X-ray, "this is definitely my patient. I remember I threw in a toe tuck for free."

"A toe tuck?" Booth said, unable to believe that someone would actually request something so trivial; people wanting new faces at least made sense, but nobody paid that much attention to toes of all things.

"What can I say?" Scheer said with a casual smile. "Toes are the new nose."

"The Board of Plastic Surgeons hasn't approved this for elective surgery," Bones noted.

"They haven't condemned it either," Scheer countered in the casual tone that suddenly put Booth in mind of his first meeting with Lindsey, each man confident of his own perceived control over the situation.

"Right, OK," Booth said, not wanting a repeat of that case in Los Angeles where Bones had spent so much time arguing with the plastic surgeon. "So, who's our girl?"

"Merial Mitsakos," Scheer explained, passing Booth a file he must have put together earlier. "She wanted the surgery 'cause she was getting married. Had her eye on a pair of Christian Louboutin sandals, but her middle toes stuck out. I said it was an easy fix."

"What; you cut her toe off so she could fit into a pair of shoes?" Booth asked, unable to believe something that sounded like the original Cinderella could actually happen in real life (He'd joined the rest of the Scoobies in carrying out background research after that mess with the paranoia demon and MOO in case something like that fairy-tale mess came up again).

"Self-mutilation for an antiquated ritual," Bones noted with a wince on her face. "It's barbaric."

"Well, come on," Booth said, feeling his usual need to defend a concept even if he agreed with some of his partner's point. "Marriage is very important to a lot of people, Bones."

"It's ridiculous. No one can guarantee how they're going to feel about someone for life. We're not a monogamous species."

"Marriage has been around since the beginning of time."

"Women from Amazonian tribes expressed their love by spitting in their partners' faces; I hope we've progressed past that."

"OK, well, you know what?" Booth said, standing up to stare his partner in the face. "Sometimes love trumps logic."

"Love is a chemical process which causes delusion," Bones said, in that smug tone she always used when discussing something that she was sure about. "An intellectually rigorous person would never get married."

"Never say never," Booth smiled (If Tara and Fred had lived long enough, he had no doubt that they'd have married Willow and Fred).

"That's a paradox," Bones looked at him, argument temporarily interrupted by her confusion. "It makes no sense."

"Am I still needed here?" Scheer asked, looking uncomfortably at the two of them. "Beucase if you two are having relationship issues-"

"We're not a couple," Bones said, grimacing at the idea.

"We just work together, that's all," Booth clarified, swiftly moving the conversation back to the central issue of the victim so that he wouldn't have to analyse his partner's reaction to that comment.

* * *

  
"OK, this is embarrassing," Hodgins mused, looking awkwardly between Booth, Bones and Angela as they walked through the Jeffersonian's hall.

"Yeah," Booth noted, looking firmly at the conspiracy theorist (right now he had to think negative if he was going to get answers out of his friend). "It's worse than that, because your picture just popped up on a dead woman's cell phone."

"Because my phone was within a hundred yards of hers."

"Hey, don't go all squinty on me, OK, Hodgins?" Booth said firmly. "I want an explanation."

"It's a dating service."

"You're using a dating service?" Angela asked in surprise.

"Yes," Hodgins nodded, passing Booth his phone. "Along with millions of other people. It's called 'Date or Hate?'. When a potential match is within a hundred yards, both our cell phones ring. You can either press 'date' or 'hate'. If we both press 'date', then we get each other's cell numbers."

"But Meriel was engaged," Bones noted. "Why would she be using a dating service?"

"I don't know," Hodgins shrugged. "Maybe she forgot to cancel."

"Guys, sex," Booth cut in, wondering why Bones wasn't seeing this first considering her previously-expressed views on marriage. "It's a no-brainer."

"Is that your reason?" Bones looked at Hodgins. "Because weren't you and Angela sexually compatible?"

"It's… not about the sex," Hodgins said, saving Booth from trying to justify that question even as the entomologist and Angela looked awkwardly at each other. "I was looking for a meaningful connection."

"I get it, Jack," Angela said.

"You do?" Hodgins asked, looking in relief at the forensic artist.

"Yeah," Angela nodded reassuringly.

"Hey, guys," Booth said urgently, not wanting his colleagues to get distracted by their personal lives. "Dead body, all right? Murder. Did you know the victim before she was a pizza?"

"No," Hodgins confirmed. "But she would definitely have many other potential dates. You should talk to the agency. The 'Date or Hate?' offices are local."

With the most useful information put together from the most awkward interview he'd ever had with a suspect, Booth was almost grateful when Hodgins' phone rang again; the sight of another 'Date or Hate?' message on the phone was potentially awkward, but at least it gave him a reason to end this conversation before he dug up any more awkward information.

* * *

  
"Hi," Bones said, walking into Booth's office.

"So her fiance's alibi checks out," Booth said, looking up from the chair where he was sorting through various files. "He was dancing the night away."

"I told Sweets about Daisy."

"Bones, why?" Booth stared at her incredulously, wondering how a woman who never stopped telling people how smart she was could sometimes be so stupid.

"Well, I felt like I was lying to him by keeping it to myself," Bones said. "How about the others?"

"The others?" Booth asked, briefly lost for what point his partner was trying to make. "He was dating other people?"

"No, the other suspects in Meriel's murder," Bones clarified. "What about Owen Smith?"

"The Bureau's doing a background check. Smith, he was using a disposable phone, and his e-mail accounts were cancelled according to Kurtis, it's a common MO for married men to get a little something-something on the side," Booth explained briefly before focusing on his partner. "Why did you have to tell Sweets? He's going to come in here, he's going to cry and stuff…"

"Excuse me," Sweets put in, leaving Booth to feel frustrated at how the man had just proven his point. "You have a minute?"

"Of course," Bones said.

"I was talking to Agent Booth," the psychiatrist corrected awkwardly. "I'd like a minute alone."

"Sure," the anthropologist said, turning around and leaving the room.

"Well, I'll get right to it," Sweets said, leaning on another chair as he looked at Booth. "Uh, Doctor Brennan told me that Daisy… is engaged to another man."

"I'm sorry, Sweets; I…" Booth began, suddenly lost for what to do in this strange role-reversal.

"It's OK, it's OK," the younger man said dismissively. "Doctor Brennan was being honest; I appreciate it."

"No you don't," Booth sighed, tossing the file aside and standing up. "Come on."

"I don't!" Sweets confirmed. "I don't! I feel like an idiot!"

"Have a seat," Booth said, moving to another chair and indicating a seat near the door. "Come on."

"Daisy, she's been canceling on me all the time lately," Sweets explained. "Like yoga the other day, and, you know, recently, at night, when she's over, the frequency of our… our intimate relations… she says that she's been tired because of her dissertation."

"I get it," Booth said, wishing the younger man hadn't gone into that much detail.

"It was right in front of me, right in front of me all along," Sweets sighed. "I'm a failure… as a lover and a psychologist."

"No, no, it's not true," Booth cut in; he wasn't used to doing this kind of thing as Angel, but even if Angelus had preferred to tear relationships down with his own warped analysis, that didn't mean that he couldn't use that level of insight to at least try and do the opposite. "Sweets, these things, they happen."

"OK, what should I do?" Sweets asked, leaning forward to address Booth directly. "I don't have many manly-man friends like you that I can talk to. What would a guy-guy do in this situation?"

"Are you… asking me if you should fight for her?" Booth asked.

"Do you think I should?"

"If you were your own patient," Booth said, already regretting letting this conversation go this far, "what kind of advice would you give yourself?"

"Impressive," Sweets said, smiling before his expression became more bitter. "Turn the question back on me; it's a classic therapeutic technique… It's really, really annoying."

"Did it work?"

"Yeah, I should confront her," Sweets nodded. "I should be candid. You're right. You're right. It's the only way. Thank you."

"Any time," Booth said, struck by the surreal idea of him giving the psychiatrist advice

"It was very helpful," Sweets began.

"The session's over," Booth cut the gratitude off, wishing that the younger man would stop trying to thank him for something so relatively small; the whole concept of _him_ giving anyone romantic advice just felt strange.

* * *

  
"Booth, it's Bones," a voice said from outside the door of Booth's apartment, where he was sitting contemplating the previous case (in the end, while a small romantic part of him appreciated that Rossi had been hurt by Meriel's rejection for such a superficial reason, in the end he couldn't help but feel that nobody in this case had been completely innocent of anything).

"Yeah," Booth said, standing up and opening the door to let his partner in. "Hi."

"Hey," Bones said, his partner looking unusually subdued. "I should've called."

"No, come on in," Booth smiled. "You kidding me?"

"I saw Sweets and Daisy, and I was wrong," Bones explained. "She wasn't cheating on him."

"Well, that's a good thing, right?"

"Well, I wanted to spare him pain, but all I did was cause it," Bones said, sitting down on the couch with a depressed slouch.

"You meant well," Booth said.

"I made him so jealous, I almost ruined their relationship," Bones waved a hand in frustration. "I should've listened to you."

"Maybe next time you will," Booth smiled. "Hey, I was just gonna go out and grab a bite to eat, some Chinese, maybe some-"

"I'd rather drink," Bones corrected. "Do you want some?"

"Yeah, we could do that…" Booth said, lost for what else to do when the anthropologist opened his good bottle of Scotch; he'd been saving that for a more significant occasion, but right now his partner's need for reassurance was more important than saving a bottle for a special occasion.

"Bottoms up, Bones," he said, as she poured a glass for him even as she kept hold of the bottle for herself.

"You know, intellectually, I know that jealousy is absurd," Bones said, looking down uncertainly at the bottle. "But I see that it's real for people. I even experience it myself."

"So…" Booth asked, sitting down next to her. "Who are you jealous of?"

"Angela," the anthropologist admitted slowly. "Hodgins. Cam. You."

"Why?"

"Because you all want to lose yourself in another person," Bones replied. "You believe that love is… transcendent and eternal. I want to believe that, too."

"Hey," Booth said, not wanting to see his partner so down about something so difficult. "You will; I promise. Someday you will. You will someday, OK? You will."

Why was it that a part of him wished that he could be the one she shared that epiphany with?


	79. Mayhem on a Cross

"Right," Booth said, adjusting his watch as he walked along the hall while the agent next to him made notes, "so for the Norwegian crucifixion case, I'm gonna need to know all there is about the heavy metal scene in DC, and tell you what, get me all the recordings you can-"

"I think you're going to have to be more specific than that, Agent Booth," Doctor Gordon Wyatt said, walking up to Booth just as he entered the main floor.

"Ha, Gordon-Gordon!" Booth smiled, shaking the other man's hand warmly.

"There's black metal, speed metal, grindcore, thrash, doom, drone, glam, sludge, metalcore, stoner metal, death metal, and deathcore," Wyatt said, before looking down at their joined hands. "Must you shake my hand with quite such a vise-like grip?"

"Right, yeah, OK," Booth said, glancing over at the other agent to confirm that he had everything before looking back at the doctor. "I thought you were a psychiatrist, huh? How'd you become such a musical expert?"

"Oh, I've got quite a, quite a musical background, you know," Wyatt smiled.

"Oh, yeah, right, uh, Saint Weatherby's Glee Club in Doo-Dah-on-Henley?" Booth smiled teasingly as they walked into his office. "I thought we loaned you out to Interpol?"

"Yes, part of the serial killer task force, traveling the globe bathed in perversion and gore," Wyatt said grimly.

"Have a seat," Booth noted, wanting to get off that topic even if he had no idea how to get an answer to his main question right now.

"And on a happier note," Wyatt said as he took the offered seat, "I'm to meet your bright young thing, Doctor Sweets?"

"Sweets?" Booth asked. "Why Sweets?"

"Well, he wants to interview me for the book he's writing on you and the lovely Dr. Brennan," Wyatt smiled, before standing up. "Anyway, I can see you're busy; perhaps, uh, while I'm here, I can barbeque for you one evening."

"Oh, no, no, I am the barbeque master, remember?" Booth countered; that was one method of cooking he'd mastered quickly once it became something he had to do, so he had a fair amount of experience in that area. "You can do the boiling."

"Ah, I have it on good authority that my culinary skills have advanced somewhat since last we ate," Wyatt smiled. "Anyway, it's good to see you."

"Yeah, you too," Booth smiled back at the other man.

He might have formed a more enduring relationship with Sweets since those first meetings when he'd been forced on them by bureau policy, but Doctor Gordon Wyatt was still the first psychiatrist he'd really trusted since he became human; when you had to keep so many secrets, it was hard to find someone you felt comfortable sharing anything with.

* * *

  
"So, why do I have the feeling that I'm being taken somewhere terrible for a… a gangland whacking?" Wyatt asked, as he sat in the back of the SUV en route to the concert.

"We are going somewhere terrible," Bones noted in her traditional blunt manner even as the two men stared at her. "We are."

"Look, we… we need your expertise," Booth said, hoping that he could just leave it at that.

"Well, I'm sure the estimable Dr. Sweets is more than qualified," Wyatt noted.

"Booth is lying about needing you."

"What?" Booth looked indignantly at his partner, once again struck by the question of how she could miss so many of his own social cues.

"He wants to talk you out of quitting psychiatry."

"Bones, I was easing into that, OK?" Booth countered; he'd been planning to focus more on Wyatt's superior expertise in this area compared to Sweets, and just take it from there to show how important he was to the agency…

"As a matter of fact, I might be able to help," Wyatt added. "You know, as a young man, I dabbled quite extensively in the rock music scene."

"Oh, wait a second," Booth chuckled at the image. "What were you, lead dulcimer in a flute band?"

"As a matter of fact," Wyatt corrected, "I was the founding member of a proto-glam rock outfit."

"I don't know what that means," Bones asked.

"It means that for three glorious years, I wore spandex, silver lame, pancake makeup, and played a guitar shaped like a spaceship," Wyatt explained. "I was quite pretty in my way."

"Wait," Booth said, remembering some of the bands he'd glimpsed during his 'grim period'; he'd mostly just read newspapers and magazines once they'd been thrown out, so he didn't exactly get the best picture of current events, but he'd picked up enough, and he'd still heard and watched a few radio and TV broadcasts from windows when he could drag himself out of his funk. "You… you were Noddy Comet."

"What's that?" Bones asked.

"Noddy Comet!" Booth smiled, pieces falling into place as he remembered seeing these concerts. "I always wondered what happened to you! You were Noddy!"

"I changed jobs," the psychiatrist said dismissively. "That's all."

"Noddy Comet!" Booth smiled again, almost unable to believe that the man he knew had undergone such a drastic transformation without the 'need' for a curse to explain it. "I got to get some of those original tapes."

* * *

  
" _Why'd you arrest me_?" the rapper known as Murderbreath said, sitting in the interrogation room in a wheelchair wearing white facepaint and a bloodstained shirt. " _I'm the one with the cut throat_."

" _Ooh_ ," Sweets said, noting the man's rough tone. " _Maybe you shouldn't talk too much_."

" _Uh, no, his larynx wasn't affected_ ," Bones corrected.

" _This is my actual voice_ ," the rapper confirmed.

" _Sounds exactly like when you sing_ ," Bones commented.

"Sounds like gravel in a hubcap," Booth noted, adjusting his tie as he watched the interrogation from his office.

" _So, that was a very good night for you_ ," Sweets smiled at the other man. " _Word gets around that you slit your own throat for real_ …"

" _You got it_ ," Murderdeath acknowledged. " _Tonight, I'm a legend_."

This was why Booth had never been comfortable with 'death metal' as a genre of music; the idea of someone being admired for doing something like that just reminded him of those vampires who'd still found something admirable about his murders as Angelus.

" _Do you have any idea who switched your prop knife_?" Bones asked.

" _One of the guys in the band, a fan, someone from another band, maybe I did it myself_ ," the man shrugged. "Who cares?"

"I bet it was Spew," Booth suggested.

" _How about Spew_?" Bones followed it up. " _Evidence indicates that you killed and crucified their bassist_."

" _This just gets better and better_ ," the rapper said, even if his tone made it hard to determine how he really felt about that. " _I'm getting credit for that_?"

" _No_ ," Sweets noted. " _See, the thing is, that same credit could send you to prison_."

"OK," Booth said over the radio. "Listen, Bones, just tell him you don't care if he did it or not, you'll just throw his ass in jail. Look," he continued, noting his partner's brief hesitation, "it's all right to lie during an interrogation, Bones. It's a technique."

" _The evidence is inconclusive regarding your guilt_ ," Bones said, before standing up to slam her hands down in the most rapid shift of stance she'd ever demonstrated in his experience, " _but I'll damn well make sure it's conclusive_!"

" _Whoa, what_?" Sweets looked at her in shock.

"Attagirl," Booth grinned. "Give it to him."

" _I will perjure myself if I have to_ ," Bones reaffirmed, slamming her hand on the table as she glared at the man in white makeup, " _because you… make… me… sick, punk_!"

" _Doctor Brennan_ -" Sweets

" _I'll put your ass on death row and laugh at your execution_ ," Bones said, walking around the table to address the rapper directly while showing him the photos. " _I will testify that your knife was used to make those gouges, and I_ _will also prove that whatever implements we find- any props, knives, cleavers, all of your stage ware- I will show that it was used to mutilate his remains… which they probably were_."

" _Good to know_ ," Sweets noted awkwardly.

"There's no rock concerts in prison," Booth put in; it was a riskier line of interrogation to suggest, but the shift might put the other man off-guard.

"There are no rock concerts in prison," Bones added in a sing-song voice

" _Rock concerts_!" Murderdeath scoffed. " _I want immunity from desecration of human remains_."

" _No promises, dirtbag_!" Bones said, slamming her hands on the table again

"Just tell him that we will talk to the prosecutor on your behalf," Booth corrected.

" _But we'll see what we can do_ ," Bones said, calming herself (Booth just hoped that last shift didn't compromise the image they were trying to create).

" _Maybe six months ago, there's a rumour_ ," Murderbreath said. " _Mayhem's dead and buried under Bridge 6, westbound lane State Road 66_."

" _6-6-6_ ," Bones smiled. " _The sign of the devil_."

Booth wondered how that idea had actually gotten around; in his experience, demons never had any interest in numerology, and certainly not something that specific.

" _Who told you_?" Sweets asked the rapper.

" _I dunno_ ," Murderbreath shrugged. " _Nobody, everybody; it was in the air, man._ _Dug up the bones. Somebody heard about this old Viking torture thing, sounded like a great gag and it was, until Skall stole it_."

" _Skall-eh_ ," Bones corrected.

" _Doesn't matter_ ," Sweets whispered back to her, only just visible over the earpieces.

" _Just trying to help_ ," Bones replied.

" _I dug him up, stole the cross, fastened the bones to it_ ," Murderbreath clarified, which at least suggested that the interruption hadn't changed his tune that much.

" _But you didn't kill him_ ," Sweets said, the rapper shaking his head in response.

"I believe him," Booth noted over the radio.

It might leave them short a suspect, but it was still progress.

* * *

  
"Now," Wyatt smiled at Booth as the two men and Bones ate in the Royal Diner, "my last official task as an FBI shrink is to declare you fit for duty."

"Gordon-Gordon!" Booth whispered, urgently tapping the table as the older man held out his gun and badge. "The gun under the table."

"I'm sorry," the English psychiatrist said, raising his hands defensively as he slipped the gun under the table, despite Booth's brief glare.

"So Booth is back?" Bones asked.

"He's back," Wyatt nodded.

"Hey, so what's next for you, Doc?" Booth asked, deciding to tackle the main question that had been bothering him since he heard the news of Wyatt's 'retirement'. "I mean, when you stop shrinking heads?"

"I've been accepted by the Institute of Culinary Arts," Wyatt replied.

"You're going to be a chef," Booth said, not sure if he could believe such a drastic change of career.

"That's correct, yes," Wyatt smiled. "I'm going to put good things into people instead of taking out things that are bad. Which I know sounds rather Freudian, but… Sigmund's been largely discredited, so to hell with him."

"I don't see why you can't do both," Booth said; he appreciated wanting a life away from poking into the heads of murderers, but this still seemed like a very drastic switch.

"Well, we still don't know who murdered Justin Dancy," Bones noted.

"Baby steps," Wyatt smiled. "You will prevail."

"This subculture," Bones said uncertainly "it takes every notion of community and turns it upside down."

"Well, no matter what they say, the fact remains that they are artists," Wyatt noted. "They create. No true nihilist ever creates. These dark tortured people may rail against the night, but they make music."

"On an oscilloscope, what we call 'music' is demonstrably distinct from what we call 'noise'," Bones countered.

"Your Doctor Sweets liked it as an adolescent," Wyatt observed. "He's turned out rather well… for the most part."

"For the most part?" Booth asked as he was about to take a sip of his coffee.

"Well, I read his book," the psychiatrist clarified. "And, as is the case with most writing, it reveals more about the writer than about the subject matter, which, in this case is you."

"Can you provide an example?" Bones asked.

"For one thing, he finds it extremely frustrating; your lack of willingness to discuss your childhood experiences with him."

"What does that tell you?"

"No, do not ask him that," Booth cut her off. "He's going to think we both had traumatic childhoods."

"We did," Bones noted. "Your father was a violent drunk and mine abandoned me."

"Great, thank you," Booth said, clapping his hands together sarcastically; his fake past as Booth was deliberately set up to discourage conversation, but he still didn't like thinking about it. "Just tell everybody here at the diner, won't you, Bones?"

"Sweets… has scars on his back," Bones observed. "Old ones."

"Really?" Wyatt asked, in the kind of tone that left it open whether he'd known that earlier.

"What kind of scars?" Booth asked, mind flashing back to the possible weapons and tools he'd encountered over the years that might cause scars significant enough for Bones to recognise them, none of them pleasant.

"Well, like he'd been whipped."

"Whipped?" Booth repeated, correcting his thoughts on past weapons but wondering what could prompt anyone to whip a child.

"I saw them," Bones confirmed.

"That explains his near-obsession with your childhood trauma, doesn't it?" Wyatt noted.

Booth tried to hide his own feelings about that; he could appreciate Sweets trying to get over a bad past, but he didn't like the idea of being an example to anyone.

* * *

  
"Noddy Comet!" Booth grinned over at Wyatt, putting some music on as the psychiatrist prepared something in Booth's kitchen while Bones sat at the table. "Look at that; unbelievable."

"This is you singing?" Bones asked Wyatt as she studied the record holder.

"Well, my alter ego, I suppose you might say," the doctor replied. "A bisexual spaceman with a taste for six-inch platform shoes, spandex, glitter, and an exhibitionists distain for underclothing."

"Well, here's to Gordon-Gordon!" Booth smiled. "Without him, we would not have been able to solve the murder."

"I hate to admit it, but it's true," Bones confirmed, raising her wineglass with Booth. "To Gordon-Gordon."

"Stop, please," Wyatt said, turning off the record. "Look, this is exactly what Sweets wanted. I'm too good a psychiatrist ever to leave, et cetera. Well, no… Just put your glasses down, would you, please ? Might I offer you a word of advice regarding young Dr. Sweets?"

"Might we try to stop you?" Booth asked.

"Why do we need advice about Sweets?" Bones cut in.

"We don't," Booth corrected her. "Sweets is just fine."

"He most definitely is not fine," Wyatt said indignantly. "I've read his book."

"What, does he say something mean about us?" Bones asked.

"On the contrary," Wyatt informed her. "You might as well know that he lost both his adoptive parents just before he came to work for your de facto crime-fighting unit."

"Geez, what are we?" Booth asked, folding his arms as he hoped this wasn't about to go where he thought it would. "The land of misfit toys?"

"Well, he's a good lad, Sweets," Wyatt continued, "but this book he's writing, he's using it as the vehicle to get what he actually wants, which is… a family."

"So he imprinted on us, like a baby duck?" Bones asked, indicating herself and Booth and receiving only a shrug from the older psychiatrist, Booth praying she'd abandon this line of inquiry before it got too personal. "So what do we do?"

"Nothing," Booth said firmly, refusing to be drawn into that kind of analogy. "OK, Sweets is not a baby duck."

"He wants what we all want," Wyatt cut in. "He wants to find out his place in the world."

Booth was stuck for how best to react to that revelation; he was still sometimes unsure if he was any closer to finding out who he was as Seeley Booth than he had been when he was trying to work out his place as Angel, but he equally wasn't sure if he was in a good position to help someone else find theirs.

"We can find a permanent place for him, right?" Bones looked at Booth.

"Gordon Gordon is going to want us to divulge or share or bond or something awful," Booth said, his tone hopefully confirming that he wasn't being that dismissive of the other man's profession.

"Look," Wyatt said, "perhaps you might just show the lad that he's not the only one with scars on his back."

"But he is," Bones said (Booth wondered how anyone would feel if he mentioned that the only reason he didn't have such scars was because of his former enhanced healing saving him from the worst of it). "Too literal."

"By the way," Wyatt said, indicating the dishes spread out on Booth's cooker, "what I'm making here, this is the masterpiece that got me accepted into the Culinary Institute. All right? But it doesn't keep. So, uh, be back in an hour, yeah?"

"Let's go," Booth said; if the other man was this 'keen' to make them confront Sweets' issues, he might as well get it over and done with.

"But where are we going?" Bones asked.

"Duck hunting," Booth said; he might not like the analogy, but if Bones had brought it up, he was going to run with it. "Come on."

* * *

  
"Sweets?" Bones asked as the two of them walked into Sweets' office, finding the other man working at his desk. "Hi."

"What are you doing here?" the psychiatrist turned around, looking at them in surprise.

"Well, uh, Gordon-Gordon is, uh, making dinner for us at my place, family-style," Booth explained, wishing he'd spent more time planning this moment on the way over rather than fretting about how he'd ended up in this situation. "And, um, you're invited."

"Thank you, but I've actually got a lot of work here…" the psychiatrist began as he indicated his computer.

"My foster parents locked me the trunk of a car for two days when I broke a dish," Bones said, beginning to visibly tear up as she continued. "I was a very clumsy child. They warned me it would happen, but the water was so hot and the… soap was so slippery. I still don't think it was fair, even though they gave me fair warning; the water was so hot…"

It was one of the rare moments when Booth had felt genuinely like Angelus even when he knew with total certainty that the vampire demon was never going to come back; right then, he suddenly wanted nothing more than to go out of this office, find whoever had done that to his partner, and show them what real cruelty and pain was.

"No, it wasn't fair at all," Sweets said, looking sympathetically at the older woman. "It wasn't your fault."

"Bones," Booth said, his voice low even as he handed his partner a handkerchief, . "what are you doing?"

"You said that scars on the back was a metaphor," Bones said. "Isn't that why we're here? To metaphorically compare scars?"

"I… came to bring Sweets back to my place for dinner; that's all," Booth said, keeping his voice low even as he handed Bones the handkerchief; he might have brought the topic up, but Bones just dropping it on Sweets like that wasn't exactly fair…

"Scars on the back?" Sweets said, looking uncomfortable at the suggestion.

"I saw them, Sweets," Bones affirmed.

"So… what?" Sweets sighed, looking curiously at the anthropologist as he stood up. "You decided to just share something from your past? That is so unlike you."

"I still hate psychology," Bones said, before turning to look at Booth. "OK. Your turn. Go."

"I came here to bring Sweets back to my place for dinner; that's all," Booth repeated, not wanting to get into that part of his past; he couldn't share any of his actual stories from his life as Angel or Angelus, and anything he might share from his life as Booth technically didn't happen…

"OK," he said, as his partner looked at him in a firm manner, "if it wasn't for my grandfather, I probably would've killed myself when I was a kid, but that's all I'm going to say on the subject matter; understand? Are you okay, Bones?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Bones said, re-folding the handkerchief and putting it back in his pocket, sniffing as she rested her hand on his pocket for slightly longer than was absolutely necessary…

 _I hate this; I bond with her by lying to her, but if I tell her the truth she'll think I'm delusional_.

"Why are you nodding?" his partner asked, breaking the moment as she looked at Sweets.

"Nothing," the doctor said. "Just… Wyatt made an observation about you two, and I think I just saw what he saw."

"You coming?" Booth asked.

"Booth means that we'd like it if you'd join us," Bones said.

"Thank you," Sweets said, joining the two of them as they left the office, conversation swiftly shifting to a debate on exactly what Wyatt was making them back at the apartment, saving Booth from the discomforting prospect of trying to follow up a story he didn't want to share anyway.

He appreciated the need to bond, but he couldn't tell any of these people what his past was really like; they'd never believe the idea that they were working with an ex-vampire…


	80. The Double Death of the Dearly Departed

"Geez," Booth reflected, as he drove Bones, Cam and Hodgins to the upcoming funeral while carefully cleaning his sunglasses, "the poor guy was only fifty."

"They say cause of death was cardiac failure resulting from a congenital defect," Bones noted.

"You're not gonna talk like that when we get there, right?"

"Like what?"

"You know, it's a wake, Bones, it's not a crime scene," Booth clarified, wondering how Bones could know so much about the process of death without fully understanding the need for people to acknowledge it. "You know, 'Hey, I'm sorry for your loss', 'How are you holding up?' Stuff like that."

"I know," Bones acknowledged. "I just don't agree with the social convention which requires us to attend a day long grieving ritual simply because the deceased worked at the Jeffersonian."

"Try not to say 'the deceased'," Booth corrected in a lower voice.

"It's not like any of us actually knew this Doctor Reilly personally," Bones continued, as though she hadn't even heard his comment.

"I knew him," Hodgins put in. "It was Hank. Hank was a prince."

"I talked to him just last week about Michelle," Cam added. "How to get her to stop smoking."

"She's smoking?" Booth asked. "She's smoking what?"

"Cigarettes," Cam said in exasperation. "I've been her legal guardian for a month and I'm already a total failure."

"She's sixteen," Booth assured her; he might not have been a typical teenager himself, but all that time with the Scoobies had to be good for something in hindsight beyond helping Angel reconnect. "She's just trying to test you, that's all."

"Maybe we should just focus on Hank," Cam noted.

"Whoa, I think I remember him," Bones said suddenly. "Curly blond hair, blue eyes, glasses…"

"Nope," Booth cut her off. "Dark hair, balding."

"You don't even work at the Jeffersonian; how do you know him?"

"The guy ran the best fantasy football league in DC," Booth clarified, briefly wondering at the days when even he surprised himself at how human he had become.

"Oh man," Hodgins groaned. "Oh man, I still owe him twenty bucks."

"Come to think of it, you know what, he owed me twenty bucks," Booth added, his memory jogged by the entomologist's comment. "Great, how am I gonna get that now?"

* * *

  
"Bones," Booth looked at his partner in frustration as he walked into the parlour to find his partner examining the body in the coffin, "what are you doing? Will you stop playing with the body?"

"Did you get the injunction?" Bones asked, still studying the body.

"No; the judge turned us down."

"But why?" the anthropologist asked, looking at him urgently.

"Why?" Booth repeated. "Because both the paramedics and the medical examiner said that Reilly here died of heart failure; _no_ evidence of translation."

"But I am contradicting them," Bones countered. "My record and credentials-"

"OK, look," Booth cut her off, not wanting another speech about her qualifications when he had to deliver more difficult news, "the judge said he didn't want to grant a request to an author of… pulp mystery books just because she wanted to get a little free publicity. There, I said it."

"That man is a fool," Bones protested. "They are not pulp."

"At least he was right about, you know, the paramedics and the medical examiner," Booth said awkwardly, half-hoping his partner would abandon this particular 'case' before it went too far.

"I will get the judge the proof he needs," Bones said firmly. "Just guard the door."

As Booth tried to get his partner away from the body, he supposed he should be grateful that the only person on the other side of the door was Cam, who could at least be trusted not to make a big scene out of what they were about to tell her

* * *

  
"Hey," Angela said, her voice low as she walked urgently into the parlour. "You stole the body?"

"No, no, no, no, we didn't steal it," Booth corrected, privately noting that it was a good thing most of the team's closest friends were those who'd signed the same confidentiality agreements; sometimes the Jeffersonian staff seemed incapable of keeping secrets. "You see, we-we borrowed it, OK? Cam and Bones think he was translated."

"What?"

"Translated," Booth repeated. "It's code for 'murder'. That's how we're saying it today; translated."

"OK," Angela said dismissively. "What if somebody looks in the coffin?"

"That's exactly why I'm here," Booth sat down in the nearest chair.

"Oh, hi, Mrs Reilley," Angela said as the door opened again, leaving Booth to quickly stand up and take in the mother of the deceased.

 _OK_ , he reflected, noting the oxygen cylinder beside the old woman, this _could be awkward…_

"Uh, would you excuse me, please?" the old woman asked. "I... I have a few private things to say to my son before he's cremated."

"That's… uh… really not a great idea right now, ma'am," Booth said.

"Why?"

"Well, there's a…" Booth began, wishing that this was an 'Angel' situation rather than a 'Booth' situation; he was better at thinking on his feet in a crisis, but this was just awkward…

"The fact is that, um, the undertaker…" Angela cut in. "He didn't graduate at the top of his class, so…"

"But I just saw Hank earlier," the woman said.

"Yes, yes you did," Angela acknowledged, still thinking quickly, "but the- the putty that they use to fill in the face has sort of... melted, and, um, his nose is sort of… going to the side. Uh, and his hair is like Hitler."

"Hitler," Booth repeated.

"Hitler?" Mrs Reilly echoed incredulously.

"Listen," Angela smiled reassuringly at the old woman, "I really think it would be best if you let Mr. Tung fix him up before you see your son."

Mrs Reilly's quick response to Angela's story as her other son appeared in the room might have been amusing under other circumstances, but right now Booth just chose to be grateful that she had bought the explanation Angela had provided.

While he was grateful for the clean start, there were times when he wished he'd met these people back when he was Angel; that kind of explanation would have been far more convenient as a means of buying the Scoobies or Angel Investigations time to deal with potential new vampires and then get out, even if hitting people over the head was a fairly simple way to deal with the problem…

* * *

  
"You see," Booth explained to Franklin Tung, the undertaker responsible for preparing Hank for autopsy, currently sitting in his car staring at his laptop, "what I have here, Franklin, is a real-time video link to the Jeffersonian forensic lab, so, say hi."

" _Hello_ ," Cam said over the video-link. " _I'm Camille Saroyan; I'm not sure we met_."

"That's Mr Reilly!" Franklin yelled, staring in shock at the body on the autopsy table.

" _Why did you hide all these stab wounds_?" Bones noted.

"It's my job to make the body presentable," Franklin explained urgently. "I did my job- I did my job- I did my job!"

"OK," Booth cut him off, "look, Mr Tung, what we need to know is who stabbed Hank Reilly?"

"I did!" Franklin yelled. "It was me!"

"You stabbed the corpse?" Booth asked, wondering how this guy could justify stabbing someone all records indicated he'd never met before Han arrived in his morgue.

"It's crazy," Franklin said, gaze darting back and forth between Booth and the screen. "This whole thing is totally crazy. Maybe I'm crazy I did acid in high school, and it's probably why I'm not a doctor-"

"OK, listen," Booth said, not wanting to get into that kind of talk. "Just relax; just tell me what happened, OK?"

"It was late," Franklin explained, tone still rapid. "Everyone had gone home, and the body had just come in. I had cleaned and disinfected him, and was about to administer the pre-injection to flush his veins before I began the arterial embalming. I went in through the right femoral artery. And suddenly – WHAM - His eyes opened. His body jerks up and spasms."

" _You panicked and stabbed him_?" Cam noted.

"It was a reflex!" Franklin protested. "Have you seen those zombie movies? They can really warp you!"

"OK, you watched zombie movies on acid?" Booth asked, privately wondering why people defaulted to zombies rather than vampires in this kind of situation before deciding that said things about his sense of 'racial pride' that he didn't want to over-analyse.

"I was scared," Franklin said firmly.

" _I get it_ ," Cam said. " _Sometimes I'm here in the middle of the night, and I swear I see one of these bodies move_."

Looking at his ex, Booth had to wonder if that was true or if she was just making up an explanation to make this guy feel better about himself, but he would definitely try to double-check the morgue in the future to make sure nothing else was coming out…

" _Let me just say, I totally get that_ ," Cam said, realising that everyone else was staring at her after her explanation.

"OK, guys," Booth cut in, deciding to get this conversation back on track, "listen, was Hank Reilly dead or alive?"

" _It wasn't a full autopsy_ ," Cam clarified. " _No_ _need, because he was declared dead by the hospital. Cause seemed reasonable, so the ME just signed off on it_."

"Can I go?" Tung asked.

"No, you can't go," Booth cut him off. "Listen, Cam, how is it that a guy can appear dead to two sets of medical professionals?"

" _There are several forms of paralysis which mimic death_ ," Bones noted.

" _Embalming would have destroyed any trace of paralytic toxins in his system_ ," Cam observed, before picking up a needle and moving to the victim's face. " _Except… a trace amount of the toxin may still be found in the vitreous humor of the eye_."

As Cam turned around to stick a needle into the corpse's eye, Booth closed the screen and decided to let Tung out of this interview. The man might have contributed to the victim's death, but it sounded like he'd been more than slightly out of it and just panicked in a bizarre situation, so he wasn't going to keep this guy in a particularly high place on the suspect list unless he had to.

* * *

  
"His wife was cheating on him," Booth mused as he drove the team back from the wake that evening, assessing their current potential motives.

"He cheated on her," Bones noted.

"The assistant is still in play."

"What about the lawyer?"

"Oh, she seems very nice," Booth said, briefly caught up in the memory of that conversation before he shoved it aside. "Yeah, all right, so we are far from an arrest here; understand, people?"

"Well, at least we got Franklin Tung," Bones observed.

"He didn't mean to kill anyone," Booth noted, wondering what it said about his life when he'd finally met someone who genuinely didn't mean to kill anyone. "That's the…" He paused as he glanced over at the medical examiner. "Cam? You here?"

"What?" his ex asked, looking up from the back seat. "I'm sorry. This smoking thing with Michele...How do people be parents?"

"Do you ever think that this is her way of trying to stop you from smoking?"

"No," Bones said. "Cam doesn't smoke, right?"

"You stop, she'll stop," Booth stated. "It's that simple. Plus, you know what? She's doing you a favour."

"Great," Cam noted. "So I go from a smoking issue to a chocolate cake and ice cream issue?"

"You know what? You just… you give your best shot and that's all."

"Nobody knows about the poison in the tea except us, right?" Bones asked suddenly.

"The murderer does," Booth cut in, wondering if his partner was following the conversation he and Cam had been having or had just been lost on her own train of thought.

"When crops failed, the ancient Pothigai in southern India believed that one of them might be possessed by an evil spirit. They would find out which one by passing around a poison which would kill only _demons_. The person who refused to drink the poison was proven possessed."

"OK, is this another way to get me to quit smoking?" Cam asked. "Because it's done; I quit."

"You know what?" Booth smiled. "You are a genius, Bones; absolute genius."

He didn't know if that ritual was completely true or not, but since he'd rarely dealt with any possession cases that might call for something like that when he was Angel, Giles and Wesley wouldn't have needed to look something like that, and it wasn't as important as the point she'd made.

This was probably going to be the most fun he'd had getting a confession out of somebody since the days when threatening to torture Gavin Park could get legitimate results.

* * *

  
"Oh, Mom, Mom, Mom…" Barney Reilly said, looking solemnly at his mother's grave, mere days after his brother's funeral.

"One thing's for sure, Barney," Booth noted, lost for anything better to say in this situation. "Your mother loved you."

"She used her own heart medicine to kill your brother, so you would get your fair share," Bones confirmed. "She mixed it in his tea."

"And she died because she ran out of her medicine killing him," Barney mused as he looked upwards, Booth noting his partner looking sceptically at the other man as he addressed the sky. "Oh, Ma... I would've done fine. Hank, I didn't want the money this way. I know you would have done right by me, I know it…"

Booth was even more lost for words at that comment; Barney Reilly seemed like a nice enough person, but what Booth ahd told him about that nove the guy was working on didn't inspire confidence…

"Would you excuse me, please?" Barney said, apparently collecting himself.

"Of course," Booth said, nodding briefly at the older man before turning to lead his partner away as Barney stared at the graves. "He wants to be alone with his mother and brother."

"By that way of thinking, he wants to be alone with every person who has ever died," Bones noted.

"If I die," Booth said, "I want you to do me a favour."

"Well, you will die, Booth," Bones pointed out. "It's inevitable."

"All right, whatever, Bones," Booth said, not wanting to get into the detail that there had been a time when his death _wasn't_ inevitable. "When I inevitably drop dead before you, I'd like you to come out and, you know, spend some time and talk to me every once in a while."

"Well, I'll feel foolish knowing you can't hear me," Bones began.

"Promise me," Booth cut her off.

He didn't want to talk about how his brief conversations with Buffy about her time in Heaven had confirmed that she had _some_ awareness of what was going on back on Earth if she focused, even if it wasn't something she'd done every day.

"I promise," Bones replied.

"Hey!" Booth grinned. "There you go, huh? Hey, you agreed. I didn't think you would agree. Now, why did you agree?"

"I believe that if I pretended you were still here, I'd feel better for a moment," Bones explained as they continued walking. "Also, speaking to you would require me to figuratively look at myself through your eyes- again, temporarily- and I think that would make me live my life more successfully."

"You know what, Bones?" Booth smiled. "That is the best thing that anyone has ever said about me."

"I'll say it at your wake," Bones promised, before the rain started and the conversation shifted to Booth making brief jokes about how his partner should make sure he was dead before burying him for good, thinking back on the days when that would be a legitimate issue rather than the joke it was now.

Her speech had been a simple one, but he appreciated how it spoke about him as a person, rather than looking at him based on the demons he'd killed or the lives he'd saved as Angel; he was proud of what he'd done, but it was nice to feel valued for who he was rather than what he did…


	81. The Girl in the Mask

"Overall," Bones noted, indicating the files on her interns in front of her as they sat at the diner, "Clark is the most astute and experienced."

"So hire him," Booth noted.

"Wendell has the most potential, and he has an excellent work ethic," Bones continued, switching to another file.

"Plus," Booth acknowledged, wanting to show his partner that he was giving the matter some thought, "you know, he's… somewhat normal."

"Well, that's what you like," Bones said, moving on to the next file. "Vincent is the most intelligent."

"Well, that's what you like, so you should hire him," Booth noted. "I mean, this person's going to be your right-hand man."

"Well, I've decided to take your opinion into account as I make this decision."

"Really?" Booth looked at the anthropologist in surprise, touched at the revelation that his partner placed that much importance on his view of something so personal.

"I'm making an effort," the anthropologist said, Booth's phone ringing just in time to save him from a potentially awkward conversation.

"Booth," he said promptly.

" _Agent Booth_ ," an accented voice said on the other end of the line, rain clearly audible in the background, " _this is Sergeant Nakamura_."

"Nake!" Booth grinned at the familiar voice; his association with Nakamura hovered on a grey area where his 'fake' memories were concerned, as it was close enough to the time he'd stopped being Angel and started being Booth that he wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't, but they'd spent enough time in contact since then to make up for that. "My friend Nake with the sake! How's it hanging?"

" _I'm afraid they are not hanging well, Booth_ ," the Japanese agent replied.

"What's wrong?" Booth asked, mind already shifting to consider the worst possibilities that might have prompted this call. He'd always considered Ken Nakamura to essentially be a mature version of himself back when he was Liam, willing to look out for his family without feeling the 'need' to rebel against his father's ideals like he had been back then, even if part of that was because the Nakamura parents were dead.

" _My sister has not returned my calls_ ," the other man said. " _It has been five days_."

"OK, look," Booth said, instinctively wanting to placate his friend's concern while wondering what this had to do with him, "we all know how overly protective you are of Sachi; your sister-"

" _You're a cop like me, Booth_ ," Nakamura said. " _She calls every day. Something's wrong_."

"OK, so why are you telling me?" Booth asked.

"' _Cause I'm in Tokyo_."

"Oh, Sachi's here in D.C.?"

" _Almost two months_ ," the Japanese detective said, now clearly getting agitated. " _She told me she called you; she has not called you_?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, just relax, all right?" Booth said, following Nakamura's conclusions even if he was trying to remain more objective. "21-year-old probably doesn't want her brother's friend cramping her style."

" _If I fly in_ ," Nakamura said, unconcerned about Booth's own views, " _can you help me look for her_?"

"I'll tell you what," Booth said, wanting to avoid the potential jurisdictional complications of Nakamura coming over here before he even knew if there was a real case to solve. "Just text me her information, I'll track her down and I'll make her call you, OK? I promise."

As the two men exchanged thanks and reassurances, Booth could only hope that would be enough; Nakamura might be over-protective, but it wasn't exactly unwarranted, and the girl meant a great deal to his friend…

* * *

  
"Bones," Booth said, indicating his old friend as his partner walked into her office, "this here is Sachi Nakamura's brother, Ken."

Bones bowed at the detective and said something in Japanese that Booth was fairly sure referenced it being an honour to meet the other man.

"The honour is mine, Doctor Brennan," Nakamura replied with his own bow, indicating the person who had come with him, a young figure- gender surprisingly unclear- in a leather jacket and loose but thick bluish-black hair. "May I present to you…"

"I know," Bones confirmed. "Doctor Haru Tanaka. The Emperor awarded Doctor Tanaka the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun for Doctor Tanaka's paper on investigation of second, fourth and eighth sternal rib end variations related to age estimation. It was brilliant."

"I am honoured to meet you," Doctor Tanaka replied, as the two forensic experts exchanged bows. "Everyone in the field accepts that you are the best."

"Yes, I know," Bones replied with her usual nonchalant 'arrogance'.

"I told Ken and the doctor that they can aid in the investigation," Booth explained, privately impressed at his partner's nonchalant reaction to the other doctor; the other arrival's reputation was good, but Bones had alienated several people in the past because she disagreed with something about the way they did things.

"That is against protocol, Booth," his partner began.

"Bones," Booth said quietly, not wanting to reinforce the point, "this could be his sister."

"I would enjoy working with Doctor Tanaka," Bones said, bowing at the doctor and receiving two more bows in return from both people.

* * *

  
Staring around the Para Puffs tea house, Booth couldn't blame Ken for feeling uncomfortable at the thought of his sister working in a place like this; even allowing for the social changes that had taken place since he and Kathy were a family, and assuming she'd been old enough to do this kind of thing legally, he doubted he would have remotely approved of his sister working in a place like this. The costumes might not all have been exactly 'inappropriate', but it still felt off to see adult women wearing those silly cat ears or fancy maid outfits…

"Hey," he said, trying to lighten the mood as he looked around the café, "I feel like someone slipped something into my coffee, huh?"

"Fashion is the way the Japanese youth rebel against traditional social roles," Nakamura said grimly.

"What is with the, uh, 'amaloli' girls?" Booth noted one of the side booths, wishing that he could spare his friend the pain of this experience. "I never expected to see the, uh, 'Sweet Lolitas' here in the States."

"The culture follows the youth," Nakamura explained. "It's just innocent role-playing… usually."

"Nak…" the ex-vampire said, noting a masked figure in one of the booths that resembled the mask Sachi's head had been wearing when discovered.

"I see," Nakamura said, the man displaying far more restraint than Booth imagined he would have shown if he was dealing with the idea of Kathy in a situation like this.

"Excuse me," Booth called over to a cook. "You the owner?"

"Why do you ask?" the man asked.

"FBI," Booth said, flashing his badge, only to be met with a disappointing lack of response from the other man until Nakamura stepped forward to address the man himself in Japanese.

"We need your help," the detective said, indicating Booth after introductions were apparently over. "As a tourist."

"We'd like to ask you a few questions about Sachi Nakamura and her friend Nozomi," Booth explained.

"Are Sachi and Nozomi in trouble?" the man asked.

"Well, Sachi is dead and Nozomi is missing," Booth said, the other man's obvious surprise at least potentially eliminating him as a suspect in the case.

"I've known them since they started coming for tea parties," he explained. "They were anime girls. I gave them jobs."

"Is this the, uh, mask that, uh, Sachi was wearing to the parties?" Booth asked, taking out a picture of the mask found in the marsh.

"No, that's Nozomi's," the man said. "What happened? Those girls were like family."

"You always fire family?" Booth asked.

"They developed other interests," the man said, at least having the dignity to sound uncomfortable about his current topic. "They didn't belong here any more. I tried to talk to them, explain what a bad choice they were making…"

"What are you talking about?" Nakamura said.

"The girls started working for an escort service," the other man said. "I couldn't allow that here; families come here-"

"That's not possible!" Nakamura cut the other man off, glaring angrily at him.

"It's true," the man said uncertainly.

"Not my sister," Nakamura looked firmly at Booth.

"Your sister?"

"You know the name of the escort service?" Booth cut in, not wanting to take that conversation further before his friend did something that would jeopardise the case.

"Elegant Escorts."

"I don't believe you!" Nakamura said, standing up and yelling something in Japanese that Booth was fairly sure was a vehement denial of the other man's claim. As Booth had to step in to stop a confrontation between the two Japanese men, he supposed that he should be grateful Nakamura hadn't drawn his gun on the other man; as it was, this was going to be difficult to clear up without risking his friend's reputation.

* * *

  
Leaning against the car that had been identified as belonging to their current suspect, Booth smiled as their target jogged up to the car, wearing a loose red jacket that couldn't have been doing him any favours in this heat. One definite advantage of being a human with authority as opposed to a vampire was that he could look intimidating at any time of day; as a vampire he might have had the advantage over anyone who knew who and what he was at night, but during the daylight he had a very obvious weakness that could make that more difficult.

"Do you mind?" James Sok asked, walking up and opening the hood of the car.

"Yeah, actually, I do," Booth said, flashing his badge while Bones watched in grim silence from the side. "James Sok, right? Elegant Escorts?"

"Yeah; so?" Sok asked. "I run a legitimate business."

"You're a pimp," Booth said, slamming the boot shut (privately wondering who thought that designing cards with the engine in the back was a good idea beyond it being some unusual 'quirk' of the design). "I don't like pimps."

"He really doesn't," Bones affirmed. "Your record says that you assaulted Bruce Takedo."

"Those charges were dropped," Sok said, raising his shirt to show a long scar. "Because the guy attacked me with a knife; all I did was protect myself."

"Really?" Booth said, not willing to give that story much credit. "Probably because you were recruiting at his place."

"Middle-aged guy, surrounds himself with schoolgirls, maybe he's the guy you want to look at," Sok replied nonchalantly.

"Nozomi Soto," Booth countered, not wanting to get into that debate as he held out the picture. "You recognise her?"

"Yeah," Sok said with a smug smile. "I like Nozomi."

"Well, she's missing," Bones added.

"Well, most of my models come from Asia," Sok shrugged. "They-they're young, flaky; sometimes they take off."

"You know, you got a sweet life, Jimmy," Booth said, putting the picture away as he looked at the other man. "You got a houseboat down at the marina. You got cash rolling in. If you want to live your life as my prime suspect in the murder of Sachi Nakamura, that's just fine. But just know, as of right now, your business is done."

"Or?" Sok asked, clearly guessing what he was about to offer.

"Or you give me something shiny to distract me," Booth acknowledged.

"I don't know anything about Sachi Nakamura," Sok replied. "But, uh, Nozomi booked a client last Friday, and I haven't seen her since."

"That's the day that Sachi Nakamura disappeared," Bones noted.

"What's the client's name?" Booth asked.

"Banker named Volger," Sok shrugged. "Got hurt bad in the Big Crunch. Made him mean. And Nozomi didn't mind a little of the rough stuff."

"Let's go, Bones," Booth said, not wanting to discuss this particular case with this specific suspect any more than he had to…

"That shiny enough for you?"

"Excuse me?" Booth said, stepping up to glare at the pimp, only just registering Bones pulling him away.

He might have to agree to uphold the deal he'd just made in order to be sure that the evidence was still admissible, but that didn't mean that he liked it.

* * *

  
"There, huh?" Booth smiled, presenting Bones with the banana split he'd put together for her; it was a little more sophisticated than what he usually did for them, but anything that stopped him thinking about how Sok essentially got off scot-free left him wanting to do something more elaborate food-wise. "It's good for what ails you."

"Usually in this situation, we'd have alcohol," Bones noted.

"Which is exactly why we should do this, OK, from time to time," Booth said, scooping up a spoonful of the split and moving it towards his partner's face, imitating the aeroplane noises in a manner that he'd never had the chance to do when Connor was a baby and never _really_ done for Parker, smiling at Bones' weak protests. "Here you go."

"Will he recover?" Bones asked, after chewing on the split for a few moments. "Your friend Ken?"

"From losing his sister?" Booth asked, suddenly flashing back to his initial reaction when he first regained his soul and remembered what he'd done to Kathy, a loss that still remained his most powerful and painful memory. "Um… well, you don't recover from something like that. You just survive."

It wasn't exactly the same, but he suddenly remembered his talk with Cordelia after that last dramatic confrontation with James; the moment when he'd realised that the thing that hurt most about Buffy's death was the fact that he could endure that kind of loss and be OK with it.

Letting it hurt was one thing, but letting that hurt consume you was something else entirely…

"People die," Bones said. "There's a fault in the design if we can't recover from it."

"'Fault in the design'?" Booth repeated, looking incredulously at his partner. "What are we, coffee pots?"

"No," Bones corrected. "I just mean that we should be designed so that we can handle the worst."

"We are designed that way," Booth said; if he could come through with having his soul returned to him and getting Angelus's sins dumped into his mind without just going completely crazy, or if Spike could endure the memory of his own sins after a few weeks of total insanity, nothing was impossible. "We aren't sent anything that we can't handle."

"I'm not convinced that loving someone is worth it," Bones mused.

"I got a son," Booth said, speaking of both Connor and Parker; he might not see his eldest son much any more, and he wasn't entirely sure how Connor would react to learning about his new life, but that didn't mean that he didn't love them both. "It's worth it."

"Even if he died?" Bones asked.

"Whoa, Bones, don't even say anything like that," Booth said, suddenly reminded of those dark few weeks after Connor had been lost in Quor-toth and he hadn't known if his son would even survive what he was going through there. "Don't even put that out there. It is worth it, and everything around it is worth it."

Even after everything he'd been through as Angel because of Connor's birth, he could never regret a single moment of the time he'd spent with his son (with the obvious exception of the time he'd spent trapped at the bottom of the ocean)

"Every moment," he repeated, " _everything_ … is worth it, so eat the ice cream before it melts."

"I wish it was beer," Bones noted, as she ate a spoonful of ice cream.

"Right," Booth said, giving up on that particular plan as he headed for the fridge, taking out a couple of beers to put them on the table. "You know what? OK, you're right."

"Now, this is what I'm talking about," Bones smiled.

"Good," Booth smiled back at her as he opened the beers and they clinked their bottles together. "We agree to understand that this is worth it."

The risks of losing people might be equality great whether he was a vampire or a human, but at least when he was human he could be sure that every relationship he experienced had a chance of ending the same way; when he was a vampire, there was always the risk that he'd lose someone to simple old age while he was stuck staying the same.


	82. The Beaver in the Otter

"Male…" Bones mused, as she studied the burned remains of what may be their latest victim but could just as easily have been a particularly tasteless college 'prank' dressed in a beaver suit. "Some of this costume is fused to the remains."

"Ah, good morning," a man in a suit put in, walking up to join Booth, Bones and the local sheriff standing around the body. "I'm Vernon Warner, the dean of students."

"I'm special agent Seeley Booth," Booth said. "This here is Dr Temperance Brennan from the Jeffersonian."

"There is a lot of damage to this body," Bones noted.

"They had a cannon- more like a blunderbuss, really- filled to the brink with bric-a-brac and shrapnel," the sheriff noted (Booth wished he'd caught the woman's name, but sometimes he was just in too much of a hurry to tackle the meat of the case to get those details).

"Yeah," the dean said. "Look, I suspect this might be a prank."

"A prank?" Bones repeated.

"It's college, Bones," Booth pointed out; he didn't think something this extreme was likely to be a prank even when he remembered some of the stories he'd heard or events he'd seen during his time as Angel, but that didn't mean it was an option he could just dismiss.

"I suspect that one of our less reflected frat house may have stolen these remains from the medical school," the dean clarified.

"Beta, Delta, Sigma," the sheriff added. "We've got a missing cadaver reported yesterday."

"You know, Bones," Booth put in, suddenly remembering an experience from his own 'implanted' memories, "when I was in college, my fraternity, we stole a cadaver, dressed it up like Caesar and put it on a statue of a horse."

"Would this, by any chance, be a fraternity of sociopaths?" Bones asked.

"Ah!" the dean put in, saving Booth from having to defend his fake fraternity. "But if the Betas did do this, I will withdraw their certifications."

"Stolen cadaver was… male," Booth said, glancing over the notes on the theft the sheriff had just mentioned, trying to take this conversation away from his fake past failings. "Seventy-three years old; his snowmobile fell through the ice, donated his body to science."

"Yes, snowmobilers and motorcyclists are our main source of cadavers," the dean put in.

"No," Bones corrected, from where she was examining the body's jaw. "The third molar has not fully erupted. I'd be surprised if he was older than mid-twenties."

"So this is not the missing cadaver?" the dean asked.

"I think you'll find you missing medical school cadaver is over there," Bones noted.

"Where?" Booth asked.

"Sitting on the bleachers," Bones explained, indicating an old man in a dark green jacket and hat slumped against the railings at the side of the bleachers. "He hasn't moved since we got here."

"No, that's just campus security," the sheriff said in a resigned tone. "They're always like that, but I'll go check it out."

"So," the dean said, now looking anxiously at the body on the ground, "if he is not a stolen cadaver, then, uh…he wasn't alive when our students shot him with the cannon, was he?"

"I won't know the cause of death until I get him back to the lab," Bones replied.

"Yeah, she's right," the sheriff called over from where she was examining the figure sitting on the grandstand. "It's your cadaver; reeks of formaldehyde."

"'K," Booth said, now wanting to get away from this situation before it got any more disturbing, "let's get it all back to the Jeffersonian, shall we?"

* * *

  
Looking at his brother as he sat at the diner, Booth once again found himself wondering if he would have felt more comfortable if Kathy had been in this kind of position. On the one hand, it was easier for him to imagine Kathy as a fundamentally better person if she'd had the chance to grow up than Jared's initial self-centred behaviour, but he had to acknowledge that part of that view was probably just the idealised memories of an older brother of the sister whose death he still felt responsible for.

It wasn't that he didn't appreciate what Jared had done for him during that last mess with the Gravedigger, but one great act of self-sacrifice didn't completely make up for his past indifference to serious problems.

"What did they say?" he looked curiously at his brother, only to be presented with an envelope which he opened and read. "Dishonourable discharge?"

"Court martial convicted me of misuse of authority and theft of government property," Jared shrugged.

"Ah," Booth sighed, struck by a sense of borrowed family pride. "No Booth has ever gotten a dishonourable discharge."

"Uh, yeah," Jared countered, as Booth rubbed his face in frustration. "No Booth has ever had to save his brother from an insane kidnapper."

"Sorry," Booth said, swiftly feeling ashamed to have forgotten the realities of the situation facing them.

"I owed you for digging me out of crap my whole life," Jared shrugged.

"You're gonna need a job," Booth said, not wanting to get too caught up in that issue .

"Well," Jared mused, "I joined the navy when I was 17, so a job, that's what civilians refer to as duty, right?"

"Booth," Booth said, further relieved for a reason not to talk about this particular issue as the phone rang.

" _Angela identified the boy in the otter suit_ ," Bones informed him.

"Well, wow, that was quick," Booth said, turning back to his brother. "Look, just give me a second."

" _Are you talking to me_?"

"No, I'm talking to my brother," Booth clarified. "Just give me one minute."

"Do your thing," Jared said as he picked up his jacket and left the counter. "I'll catch up with you later."

"Look," Booth called after his brother. "Hey, I'll help you find a job."

" _What? Me_?" Bones' voice cut in, leaving Booth wondering at his partner's continued ability to miss key details despite her alleged intellect.

"I saved your life, you find me a job," Jared mused, looking at Booth with a pointed stare. "Yeah, that seems fair."

"Yeah," Booth turned his attention back to the phone. "I'm back."

" _The student's walk-in dentist was able to provide dental records; I e-mailed you the particulars_ ," Bones explained. " _The victim is James Bouvier. His friends called him Beaver, I assume because of his last name, which is Bouvier_."

"Yeah, I'm sure that's why," Booth said, making a note to check photos of this victim to confirm the state of his teeth before his death.

" _Although, despite the similar sounds, 'bouvier' means ox, not beaver_ ," Bones said, before continuing with more relevant information. " _Beaver is twenty-three years old and a member of the Beta Delta Sigma fraternity_."

"Yeah, that's not a coincidence," Booth noted.

" _Statistically_ ," Bones observed, " _given the size of the campus, it could be a complete coincidence that the murdered student is also a member of the group of sociopathic young male cadaver thieves_."

"Statistically, maybe, but this is not math class, OK, Bones?" Booth corrected. "Just meet me at Middlesex College in thirty minutes."

Hanging up the phone, Booth got to his feet and left the diner; if he was going to get Jared back on his feet, the sooner he could solve this case the better.

He just hoped this wasn't going to turn out like that fraternity that had tried to sacrifice Buffy and Cordelia back in Sunnydale; that whole experience had been unpleasant for too many reasons to count…

* * *

  
"I'm Robert Hooper, Beta Delta chapter president," the young man at the front of the group of students said, indicating one of the others as he sat down. "This is Dalton Abbot; he helped Beaver steal the corpse from the medical school."

"Listen, guys," Booth said, wanting to make this point clear to hopefully avoid pointless deflection of his questions, "we don't care about the cadaver, we just want to find out who killed your brother."

"We agreed," another member of the group said, "before you got here, that we'd answer any and all questions you have, truthfully."

"A conspiracy to tell the truth," Sweets noted, even as the rest of the fraternity muttered their confirmation. "Interesting."

"Yeah", Robert said, indicating the young man who'd just spoken. "Eli was the Beaver's frosh, you know, kinda breaking him in the Greek life."

"What was Beaver like?" Sweets asked.

"Beaver was the most popular guy in the house."

"No," Sweets clarified. "I asked what was he like, not was he liked."

"Sweets," Booth said, wondering at how a genius could be such an idiot.

"What?" the psychiatrist protested, clearly lost for once about the implications of his question. "There's a difference."

"Look," Eli said, "the Beaver was exactly like a great guy, who everybody liked."

"What was Beaver's life like outside the fraternity?" Booth put in.

"Like Eli said," Robert noted, "everybody liked him."

"Well," Eli put in, "except for the faculty; he was on academic probation."

"Academic probation is the price you pay for everyone liking you," Robert said with a smile, which at least assured Booth that people didn't change that drastically.

"Girlfriend?" Sweets asked. "Or is this one of those 'Bros before Hoes' kind of frats?"

"Beaver was more like a partier," Robert clarified after a brief chuckle.

"Well," Booth put in, "we do know that Beaver was with at least one girl."

"Why?" Sweets asked. "What makes you think so?"

"Scoreboard," Booth said, indicating a board that had been behind Sweets for the last few minutes.

"What?" Sweets asked, turning around to look at the board in question.

"Beaver," Booth elaborated. "One star; one conquest."

"So," Sweets asked, turning back to the students, "do the stars here represent the number of times individual members of the fraternity completed the sex act or the number of girls?"

"The second."

"Just curious," Sweets nodded. "Do you also compare penis size?"

"No!" Eli smiled. "Only if we're really drunk and already naked."

"What?" Robert looked incredulously at the shorter student, similar sounds of indignation coming from the rest of the fraternity.

"What?" Eli protested. "We agreed to answer all their questions truthfully."

"Dalton Abbott," Sweets continued, noting the full row of stars at the top. "Very successful, according to this, compensating for something…"

"Sweets," Booth glared at the younger man even if the psychiatrist had kept that last comment quiet, "just stop psycho-analysing frat life and just get on with the Beaver questions."

"Sure, of course," Sweets continued, before turning to the fraternity. "But guys, wouldn't it be more impressive to actually have a single girl want to have sex with you multiple times, unless your only objective is to impress other adolescent males?"

"Guys!" Booth cut that debate off; even if he agreed with the concept in principle, his real memories of Xander and his own fake memories made it unlikely these frat boys would be interested in that kind of argument. "Beaver's single star?"

"Molly Briggs," Eli put in.

"Thank you," Booth said even as the rest of the fraternity appeared angry at that revelation.

"Guys," Eli looked at the rest of the fraternity, "we agreed, for the last time…"

"If Harmalard found out that the Beaver was bouncing Molly, he'd kill him," Robert said, tacitly acknowledging Eli's argument.

"Greg Harmalard?" Booth asked. "The guy who organised the bonfire?"

"Yeah," Robert confirmed. "Molly's boyfriend; he's in ROTC."

"They like shooting things," Booth noted.

It wasn't exactly evidence, but that still left them with a possible answer for a few key questions about what might have happened to their victim.

* * *

  
"They keep track of sexual conquest with stars on the wall?" Bones asked, as she walked with him and Sweets towards her office.

"It's emotionally stunted," Sweets said.

"Guys," Booth cut in, amazed that he was the only one who seemed to get this when he was the only one who'd never actually _been_ to college. "It's a college fraternity."

"They seem like really terrible people."

"They're college kids," Booth said, ignoring the part of him that remembered Buffy and Willow as college students; they would have been exceptional cases even if they weren't the Slayer and the most powerful witch he'd ever met. "It's their job description to be bad; it's what they do."

"Yeah, but still," Sweets continued as he sat on the couch, "a community of young men mutually supporting bad decisions…"

"Look," Booth said, wondering how neither of these alleged geniuses understood this when he hadn't even genuinely been to college himself, "these kids, they go out into the world, they're alone, they have no supervision, they have to be bad just in order to figure out what it is, you know. Scientific fact, their frontal lobes are the size of raisins."

"No, that is not a scientific fact," Bones protested.

"What they've gotta do," Booth continued, ignoring that particular statement in favour of making his point, "is build their frontal lobes, with exercise, and that comes from doing the wrong thing."

"OK," Sweets noted. "So your theory is, you gotta be bad to be good?"

"Exactly; facts of life, my friends," Booth noted, suddenly grateful for his decades of indifference after gaining his soul before his time with Buffy helped him recognise the need to be better. "OK, so what transmissions did you get from the brothers?"

"Booth!" Bones cut the agent off. "He is not a radio!"

"He kinda is; that's why I brought him along."

"What I did observe," Sweets said, thankfully ignoring that debate, "using my eyes and my training, is that these three frat brothers weren't actually upset about Beaver's death."

"How did you know?" Bones put in.

"Well, real grief comes and goes in waves; those guys had their faces set in sad, the whole time. They were lying."

"I believe you're just guessing!" Bones countered.

"OK, fine; I'm a magic 8 ball," Sweets shrugged in frustration, standing up and walking out of the room as the subsequent awkward silence became too awkward.

"I think you hurt his feelings," Booth noted.

"Did you believe him?" Bones asked.

When Cam walked in to reveal that she had identified the killing bullet, Booth was grateful to have a reason to divert his partner's attention to a style of investigation that she would be more comfortable with; it saved him having to consider those particular issues of fraternity life in greater depth than he was comfortable with.

* * *

  
"OK," Bones asked, as they entered Beaver's room in the frat house, "what are we looking for this time?"

"You know," Booth shrugged, "photos, love notes, I don't know, fur, gray hair, anything that's gonna help us identify Beaver's cougar."

"Beaver, otter, cougar," Bones mused. "This case is like a day at the zoo!"

"A cougar is an older woman who prefers younger men," Booth clarified.

"Wouldn't that indicate that every woman is a cougar?"

"Thanks for the insight there, Bones," Booth mused as he picked up a briefcase from under the bed. "OK, what's the victim's birthday?"

"11-05-89," Bones replied automatically (Once again, Booth briefly wondered how this woman could remember so many minor details about bones and their victims' biographies while still having such trouble with the subtle nuances of people).

"I'm Jared's older brother, you know," Booth put in, suddenly reminded of his brother's latest impulsive plans. "He should listen to me."

"I can provide you with several societies where younger brothers are required under pry of death to do what their older brothers tell them," Bones said as she examined the room's desk.

"I like those societies," Booth said, even as he hoped that his partner knew he wasn't being serious.

"Well, they're mostly extinct now anyway."

"Did you give me Beaver's birthday the scientific way?" he asked, trying to take his mind off that issue while attending to the briefcase in front of him; not for the first time, he acknowledged that it would have been easier to care for Kathy than it was to look after Jared.

"Day, month, year," Bones clarified. "If you want month-day-year, 05-11-89."

"Ha-ah!" Booth smiled, as the case clicked open. "Look at that! So when I ask a question, just answer in American, that's all."

Opening the case, Booth's eyes widened as he studied the contents. "Whoa, the kid had some cash."

"Maybe he was a drug dealer?" Bones asked, Booth only able to hum in thought as Bones picked up a notebook from the case and opened it. "What are these? Some kind of code book?"

"You got that right," Booth said, assessing the six columns before him.

"Was our victim some kind of spy?"

"Worse," Booth answered grimly. "Some kind of bookie."

He enjoyed his work for the bureau, but there were times when he would give anything for a simple case where motive and identity were quick to establish and all he had to work out was method.

* * *

  
"OK," Booth said, walking into the Founding Fathers to sit beside Jared.

"You're not coming, are you?" Jared asked, thoughtfully staring at his beer.

"You really wanted me to?"

"Does it matter?"

"You know," Booth mused, "I was going to, I really was, but, uh… I think you should go alone."

"You think it's a good idea for me to go to India?"

"Yeah, I do, alone," Booth said, suddenly thinking back on their faked past history and wondering what Jared would have been like if he'd never been inserted into the Booths' lives. "Our whole lives, as kids, I was always standing behind you. Or you had the Navy stand behind you, but this time, y'know, I think you should stand alone. You don't need your big brother."

"So come as a friend."

"We both know I'm not your friend," Booth countered. "I'm your big brother."

It was an odd distinction to make, but just as he had needed to go out on his own to find himself in Los Angeles rather than staying with Buffy's group, Jared needed to stand on his own now.

"Yep," Jared smiled, evidently accepting that statement in the spirit it was intended.

"Alright, right," Booth said, taking out a medallion and placing it on the counter. "So, got you something."

"It's Grandpa's St Christopher medallion," Jared noted.

"No, no," Booth said, aware that the protest was weak but feeling obligated to make the effort. "It's a new one; I got you that."

"Seeley, it looks like the one Grandpa gave you."

"Nooo, Grandpa gave me mine when I was whipped out to the rangers," Booth corrected. "This one, I'm giving to you. Patron Saint of Travelers. It kept me safe in Somalia; let's hope it does the same for you in India. Wear it around your neck."

"I don't know, man," Jared smiled thoughtfully. "Am I alone if I take a saint with me?"

"You're not alone," Booth said.

"Thanks," Jared smiled after putting the medallion on, walking away with only a brief pause to accept his forgotten jacket. Stuck for anything else to do with his time, Booth moved over to the other side of the bar, waiting for a moments until Bones joined him.

"How'd he take it?" the anthropologist asked.

"It's Jared," Booth responded. "Meaning I have no idea."

"So," Bones asked. "do you… do you really think you have to be bad to be good?"

The answer to that question was a many-layered answer that Booth couldn't answer in depth without giving away more of himself than he was willing to disclose at this point, but as Bones looked at him, he felt obliged to share one of the few lessons he felt was still valid even after so long since he'd been Angel; humanity had to be able to make a choice to be considered truly 'good' or 'evil'.

Bones might only be prepared to make smaller concessions to that idea, such as maybe a 'dine and dash' right now, but there was still something she could learn from the experience…


	83. The Critic in the Cabernet

"It's quite simple," Sweets said, opening the blinds in his office as he moved back to his chair, addressing Bones in particular. "Whatever Agent Booth says, you respond with whatever word or phrase pops into your head. And vice versa."

"Well, that's ridiculous," Bones countered. "I can't respond properly without careful thought."

"Can't we just make it a drinking game?" Booth asked. He might have 'trained' himself not to respond to these kind of questions with anything that would give away his past identity as Angel, but he still wasn't exactly comfortable with the idea of balancing honesty with the truth.

"No," Sweets said firmly. "This is a valuable, psychological tool, Agent Booth; when you respond viscerally we can get to the root of your emotional issues and figure out what binds you two together as partners."

"Doughnuts," Booth finally said, hoping that a relatively neutral word would work to start this off.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Doughnuts," Booth repeated. "Glazed doughnuts. I see 'em right there-"

"Because you had no breakfast," Bones cut in with a smile. "You're hungry."

"I'm starving," Booth affirmed, moving from the edge of the couch to the main seat.

"No, that's not the proper response," Sweets cut in.

"Of course it is," Bones said. "I'm explaining why he said 'doughnuts'."

"The point of the exercise is not to explain, but to respond, OK? Children can do this."

"Because it's childish."

"Can we just try it, please?" Sweets said, clearly resigned to the anthropologist's objections to his profession by now.

"All right," Booth said, settling into the chair; as awkward as it was, the sooner he got this over with the better. "OK, fine, here we go… are you ready? Hunger."

"Sex."

"Whoa," Booth said, looking at his partner in surprise, suddenly reminded of Faith's old philosophy of being 'horny or hungry' after a good slaying session.

"Horse," Bones said

"Cowboy," Booth responded, deciding to go along with this rather than clarify his response.

"Child."

"Baby."

"Booth."

"What?" Booth looked at his partner in confusion at the turn of their 'conversation'. "Do you think I'm a baby?"

"You're a father," Bones clarified.

"Oh," Booth said, deciding to move on. "Mother."

"Birth."

"Happy."

"Sperm."

"Sperm?" Booth repeated, confusion once again ignited. "Isn't this getting a little weird?"

"No, keep going," Sweets said.

"OK… egg."

"I want a baby."

"Whoa," Booth stared at the anthropologist incredulously.

"Horse," the woman replied automatically.

"Wait," Booth cut the conversation off. "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute."

"Yeah, we can stop here," Sweets cut in, which at least suggested he appreciated Booth's perspective.

"I actually found that quite interesting," Bones mused.

"You want to have a baby?" Booth stared incredulously at the woman who had so often expressed discomfort with the idea of parenthood.

"Yes, I do," Bones explained. "I just- I just realised it. I should have a progeny. It's selfish of me not to."

"Selfish?" Booth repeated, wondering if that was a remotely logical response to something this big and impulsive.

"Yes."

"Don't you need a, you know, guy to…"

"Just sperm," Bones noted, looking him over as she spoke. "You'd be a very good donor, potentially."

"Me?" Booth responded, lost at the disturbingly personal turn this conversation had just taken and his partner's nonchalance about this topic.

"But you need to be tested, of course," Bones said, just as Booth's phone started to ring. "What, is something wrong?"

"Yeah, OK, you don't just go around asking for people's sperm," Booth said, answering the call and barely registering the specifics so long as the key details got him out of this mess. "We got a case."

"OK," Bones said, apparently comfortable leaving the conversation as it was as they left Sweets' office.

"Uh, wait," the psychiatrist called after them. "Perhaps we should discuss this?"

"I'm not conflicted, if that's what you're concerned about," Bones said calmly. "I've made a reasonable choice."

"In two seconds over some stupid life game," Booth countered.

"This is a well researched, therapeutic technique, Agent Booth," Sweets cut in.

"Oh, really?" Booth glared at the younger man, suddenly wishing that he could vent his frustrations at Sweets the old-fashioned way. "This happens all the time; patients asking for sperm?"

"Yeah… no, well, not this specifically," Sweets admitted. "Which is why I think some discussion is in order."

"Shouldn't we go?" Bones asked. "Don't we have a case?"

"Yeah, you're right," Booth said, relieved at the chance to table this discussion until he had more time to think. "We gotta get going, right… this is all your fault."

He didn't stay to listen to the young man's defence as he walked briskly from the building towards the scene of their next case; whatever they were about to investigate here, it had to be better than facing a conversation like this.

* * *

  
"So apparently, Holt's wife was pregnant when he disappeared," Booth noted as he drove the SUV towards their next 'appointment'.

"So she's raising the child alone?" Bones noted.

"I guess so," Booth acknowledged.

"You know, no one thinks twice about that," Bones said, glancing between the file and Booth. "There are millions of single women raising healthy, productive children… There was a domestic disturbance report filed a month before he disappeared."

"Uh, you know," Booth said, feeling as though he should bring the topic up. "If you go through with this, and I'm around, and if you need help…"

"Well, I'll have a nanny."

"I-I figured," Booth acknowledged, once again wishing that his partner was less ignorant of social cues. "But, you know, if it's her day off…"

"You don't have faith that I can do it?"

"What?" Booth looked at her in surprise, wondering how she could think that was the issue he had with the proposed situation after all the time they'd spent together.

"You think I'll be a good mother, don't you?" Bones elaborated.

"Yeah, of course," Booth replied; he still wasn't comfortable with this topic, but he wasn't going to discourage her personal development.

"I know sometimes you don't think I'm empathic," Bones continued. "And it can be difficult for me sometimes. But I would love my child, Booth, I would."

"I know," Booth said, hating even the idea that he could have said or done something to give his partner that impression; he thought that she was socially awkward, but that didn't mean that he thought she was emotionally incompetent. "I-I know that, Bones."

"I know people disapprove," Bones continued. "If you're uncomfortable, Fisher sells his sperm monthly, he's very intelligent and-"

"Fisher?" Booth cut her off incredulously, remembering the disturbingly morbid intern. "Oh, no, you are not having Fisher's kids; you'd be giving birth to the spawn of Satan, OK? I'll do it."

"No obligation," Bones said again. "I don't want you to feel any obligation."

"I'll do it," Booth said, wanting to focus on what his partner wanted even if it was hardly a situation he was comfortable with. "Don't worry about it, OK? It's your kid; it's totally yours."

"Not worried about it."

"I'm just saying I'll do it."

 _Even if I worry about your social abilities if you can't realise why I'm_ really _uncomfortable with all this_ …

* * *

  
"It's quite simple; you just ejaculate into the cup," the nurse at the sperm bank said, as she led Booth into the small room where he would provide his sample. "Here we go, Mr Booth… You look a little flushed; are you OK?"

"Sure; I'm fine," Booth said.

"Sometimes men can feel awkward," the nurse continued. "Knowing people out there know what you're doing in here."

"Thanks for that," Booth said; Angelus might have enjoyed sex in front of others as part of his torture sessions when it was 'appropriate', but even the suggestion of the nurse's hints made Booth feel uncomfortable.

"You know what to do?" the nurse asked.

"You're kidding, right?" Booth replied.

"OK," the nurse said. "There are magazines and videos, if you need them. Enjoy."

With that, the nurse closed the door, leaving Booth to look around the small room; a fish tank, a TV with various porn movies underneath it, a small stack of adult magazines…

Lost for a better response, Booth turned around to lock the door-

"Why are you here at the bank, Booth?" a voice said.

Spinning around to look at the television, Booth could only stare incredulously at the screen that was now displaying Stewie Griffin, the baby from the cartoon of _Family Guy_ ; he'd become more up-to-date with popular culture since he became human, but he couldn't think of a single reason why he'd see this of all things in a situation like this.

"You've got a hot doctor friend," 'Stewie' said. "Go to her and make a direct deposit like a man."

Lost for a better response, Booth turned the television off, pressing the power button and stepping back in relief when the screen went black.

"That's impossible…" he said; Wesley might have mentioned some kind of seer that manifested around a drive-in burger place, but he'd still needed to perform a ritual for that entity to manifest in the first place…

"And yet we converse," Stewie said as the television came back on, Booth jumping in shock at the sound. "Ooh, look, a pile of porn; delicious. Give me a peek, Booth. Mmm? Just a little peek at a booby? Please?"

Stuck for better ideas, Booth went around to the back of the television and unplugged the screen.

 _OK_ , he told himself as he walked back to the middle of the room. _That's dealt with… he can't talk to me through the TV if the TV isn't even_ on _…_

"What's the problem?" Stewie said, the TV turning back on as he moved towards the magazines. "You're threatened by a cute, harmless baby? Grow a set! You do want her to have your baby, don't you?"

"Of course I do, it's just…" Booth said, lost for a better response to this mess. "I want her to have a baby because it's what she wants."

"And you could just walk away like a heartless cad while she changes poo all by her lonesome?"

"It's what she wants," Booth countered, wishing he could stop himself having this kind of argument with a cartoon baby that he knew couldn't be here.

"Are you OK in there, Mr Booth?" the nurse suddenly said from outside.

"I'm fine," Booth said, grabbing some DVDs for lack of a better option. "Just, uh, fine, thanks."

With that said, he turned back to glare at the screen, hoping that a direct response would do the job in this ridiculous situation. "Listen, could you just go away now, OK? I don't need your help."

"You know," Stewie suddenly smiled at him. "you're not a bad looking fellow, and if you'd just keep an open mind…"

"Go back to cartoon land or wherever you came from," Booth cut the baby off, not wanting to get into that particular bizarre mess. "Leave!"

"You sure?" the baby smiled. "I'm good at pretend games."

Before this situation could get any weirder, Booth turned the television off once again with the remote control, watching in silence for a moment to be sure that it was going to stay dark this time.

"That wasn't possible," he said at last, praying that this experience didn't mark the return of the supernatural to his life.

* * *

  
"I have an appointment with a fertility specialist next week," Bones said to Sweets as she sat on the couch. "I could be inseminated within a month."

"Really?" Booth looked at her in surprise from his position by the office's window.

"You didn't tell Agent Booth?" Sweets noted.

"I promised him he wouldn't have to be involved."

"Right, exactly," Booth said, once again falling back on his decision to defend his partner even against his own preferences. "You see, 'cause we have a… an arrangement."

"Well, I thought that these sessions were meant for you to see how we interact as partners," Bones noted. "How does this relate?"

"You're using Agent Booth to have a child," Sweets noted in a blandly incredulous tone. "You don't see how that might relate to your partnership?"

"It has nothing to do with our work."

"OK, um, let me just organise my thoughts here," Sweets said, resting his head on his left hand.

"It's not like I'm going to be bringing the child along when we interrogate someone," Bones countered, once again demonstrating her inability to get the emotional context of the situation.

"Ah, but you might decide to breastfeed," Booth cut in, latching on to the first thing he could think of that might inspire his partner to consider the situation at hand. "It is healthier."

"Oh, that's true," Bones noted. "So, yes, there might be some crossover. I can see that now. I'm sorry, go on."

"I think you need to acknowledge that there are some emotional considerations that you might be denying," Sweets put in, which at least had the advantage of voicing what Booth was feeling without leaving him obligated to bring it up.

"Like what?" Bones said, dashing his hopes that she'd understand that much.

"There are sperm banks that guarantee high IQs and exceptional physical prowess, yet you specifically chose Agent Booth," Sweets elaborated. "Why?"

"He has traits like courage and compassion and empathy that would be tremendous assets to my child," Bones explained. "Sperm banks don't catalog those traits."

"Did you just say something nice?" Booth asked, deciding to focus on the positives.

"No, I gave an objective valuation," the anthropologist clarified.

"Oh, because it sounded like you said something nice," Booth smiled, grateful for this opportunity to return to their more familiar banter even amid a more difficult topic.

"How can you two not see what is going on here?" Sweets said urgently.

"Sweets, what is the big deal?" Booth protested, even as he wanted to explicitly agree with the psychiatrist's ideas for the first time since he'd met the other man. "She was gonna have a baby anyway, I mean, with Fisher. _Fisher_ , OK? What would you have done?"

"Again, what I would have done is not important, but you, you admitted to feelings of anxiety," Sweets said, firmly pointing at Booth.

"You know what, Sweets?" Booth countered. "You are crossing a line right here."

"I agree," Bones noted.

"No, I'm not, actually," the younger man countered. "In my position, I could make an evaluation that states that you two are not suited to work together because of interpersonal issues that are not being dealt with."

"Ridiculous," Bones said.

"Dreamer," Booth added.

"So perhaps until our next session, maybe you should think about some of the things that I brought up today," Sweets finished.

 _Damnit_ … Booth thought, even as he and Bones left the office. He appreciated that the younger man meant well, but there were times when he really wished the kid knew when not to press the issues he was bringing up; hadn't that mess with Angela and Hodgins last year taught Sweets that sometimes poking his nose into problems was what actually made them an issue?

* * *

  
"We found cases of this in your warehouse," Booth said, displaying a bottle to Dunwood as he and Bones walked into the interrogation room where the other man was already sitting. "You were counterfeiting Bedford Creek wine."

"You charged a hundred dollars for a three-dollar wine," Bones put in.

"The stupid wine snobs, they don't even know the difference."

"But Holt did," the anthropologist continued. "He found out, didn't he? He was going to tell Mortenson."

"It was none of Holt's business," Dunwood said coolly. "I told him to stay out of it. I need the money to fight Mortenson's bogus lawsuits. I wasn't gonna let that bastard take my place; my family's been there for over eighty years."

"Is this man a complete dunce?" Stewie Griffin said, suddenly appearing in a high chair beside Dunwood as he waved at Booth.

"Oh God," Booth said, unable to stop himself staring at the cartoon baby.

"What is it?" Bones asked, her non-reaction to Stewie's presence at least suggesting that things weren't so screwed up that a cartoon baby was really here.

"Why doesn't he just clam up and ask for a lawyer?" Stewie said, glaring at Dunwood. "You, sir, are a boob."

"Some people," Booth said, feeling a need to address the baby, "they just feel remorse, and they want to set the record straight."

"Oh please!" Stewie said dismissively. "He makes wine a homeless person wouldn't cook with; he never felt remorse about that."

"Nobody asked you," Booth said, resolving to ignore Stewie as he turned his attention back to Dunwood.

"Booth," Bones looked at him uncertainly, "who are you talking to?"

"What's going on?" Dunwood asked.

"Nothing," Booth said, trying to regain control of himself. "Just, uh, go on."

"I followed him to Mortenson's," Dunwood said, "He had one of the bottles, and it was late and…"

"And you cornered him in the wine cellar and beat him to death to shut him up," Stewie said, glaring at the momentarily silent winery owner. "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah; we know."

"Will you shut up?" Booth yelled, his already-short patience further frayed by the baby's attitude. "Shut up!"

"Booth," Bones looked at him firmly, "who are you talking to?"

"So," Stewie said, his mood shifting, "are you going to let her have this baby alone?"

"I didn't say that," Booth said.

"You are!" Stewie said firmly. "You're going to abandon your child! Oh, night's deepest gloom washes over my tiny frame."

"No, no," Booth said, the interrogation forgotten as he looked urgently at Stewie. "I- I can't walk away; I never said that, OK? Do you understand? I can't walk away. This is my kid. If I can't be involved, I don't want her to have the baby!"

"And the sun shines again!" Stewie said, his arms spread wide as he stood up in his chair. "Good man, Boothie!"

"What the Hell's going on here?" Dunwood said.

"You shut up and don't move," Bones said firmly to the prisoner, before looking back at Booth and grabbing him by the arm, hauling him to his feet. "Booth, you're coming with me."

"Hey, hey, wait; stop!" Stewie yelled as Booth was led out of the room. "You're leaving a helpless child alone with a killer! Stop!"

Booth was grateful to have the choice taken out of his hands as Bones closed the door of the interrogation room behind them, even if he had no idea what was about to happen to them.

"Hey," his partner said urgently, "what is going on?"

"I can't do it," Booth said, aware on some level of what his partner wanted to hear but unable to get his mind on anything else. "Listen, I have to be involved. If I'm the father, then… I have to be a father."

"You were seeing something in there," Bones said, his own words apparently unimportant in the face of her own concerns. "What were you seeing?"

"Stewie," Booth shrugged. "You know, the baby from _Family Guy_."

"You… you saw Stewie… in there?" Bones said (on a vague level, Booth noted that at least the anthropologist knew who he was talking about now). "In the interrogation room?"

"So what do you say about the kid?" Booth said, unable to bring his mind to focus; he knew that his partner was concerned about something, but he couldn't ignore his own concerns right now…

"Fine," Bones said briefly. "I won't have the baby."

"Fine?" Booth looked at her in surprise. "That's it?"

"No," Bones said. "It doesn't matter now; we're going to the hospital."

"It's no big deal, OK?"

"It is," Bones said urgently. "Booth, you thought you saw Luc Robitaille and then the ghost of a dead friend and now a cartoon baby. Trust me, something is wrong; trust me."

Even if he didn't _feel_ that anything was wrong on one level, on another, Booth accepted what his partner was saying to him with relative ease.

Whatever was wrong right now, he trusted that Bones could help him deal with this problem only she could see symptoms for; if it was a repeat of the last time he'd been seeing the dead, he was going to need serious help to get out…

* * *

  
Lying on the hospital bed as they wheeled him towards the operating room, Booth wondered if he should grateful at this further evidence of his fundamental humanity. The Powers That Be might have granted him his humanity, but unless he'd seriously misread their motives, he was fairly sure nobody up there would have planned for him to end up with this tumour.

Still, he could at least be grateful that they'd caught it in time; the experience had been terrifying and disturbing, but he had to have faith that everyone involved in giving him this chance at humanity wouldn't let it end just because his brain tissue went screwy on him.

"Can we just stop for a second?" he asked, looking between the two nearby nurses and his partner on his right. "Can you just give me a minute, please?"

The nurses backed off and left, leaving

"What's wrong?" Bones asked.

"Listen, Bones, if I don't make it…"

"Booth, you're gonna be fine," Bones said firmly.

"Yeah, but if I'm not…" Booth said, wishing he could say everything he wanted to say at this moment even as his fears of the future forced him to keep something back. "I want you to have my stuff. You know, for a kid."

"Booth," Bones began.

"I want you to," Booth said. "You're gonna be a really good mom."

He had doubts about this whole situation if he was expected to stay out of the baby's life, but if he wasn't going to make it through what was about to happen, he wanted to leave his partner something to remember him by.

"You're going to be fine, Booth," Bones said, squeezing his hand reassuringly. "I'll be right here."

It was a small action, but Booth appreciated that show of support, no matter how little it might mean in this situation.

"I'm ready," he said, lying back on the bed as the nurses gathered around the bed, continuing him towards the operating room.

He knew that he needed this operation, and he knew that it was as safe as it could possibly be, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something else was going on with this tumour…


	84. The End in the Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter of this story; after this, events continue in “The Sister in the Door”, which explains the full implications of this scene…

_You think you've won anything, 'boyo'?_

_Who said that?_

_You really think you're any kind of champion in this world? You gave up everything you were to be some pathetic official flatfoot mooning over the sexy doctor?_

_What gives you the right-?_

_Oh, we've known each other for a_ very _long time, buddy… and hopefully you'll be seeing me sooner rather than later…_

_What are you talking-?_

_You'll see when I'm ready, Boothy-boy, and_ not _before._

* * *

  
Lying in bed, suddenly struck by both a sense of fatigue and a strange sense of unmourned loss, he didn't know what had just happened to him.

He had this strong sensation that he'd been dealing with some kind of murder mystery, involving a very modern-looking nightclub and a group of people he knew and somehow _didn't_ know, but there were also memories of a life where doing that kind of thing was part of his regular day, in a laboratory that looked _just_ like that nightclub, and then there were the more complicated memories of almost three centuries killing people, brooding around in alleys, and saving lives against all kinds of monsters…

' _The thought of losing so much control over personal happiness is unbearable,'_ a voice said from somewhere outside him _. 'You love someone, you open yourself up to suffering, that's the sad truth. Maybe they'll break your heart; maybe you'll break their heart and never be able to look at yourself in the same way. Those are the risks. That's the burden. Like wings, they have weight, we feel that weight on our backs, but they are a burden that lifts us. Burdens which allow us to fly_.'

He didn't know where he'd heard that, but something about the voice that spoke those words resonated with him…

 _What kind of_ life _do I have_? he asked himself.

Something about the burden of romance felt so much more profound than it felt like it should if he only had an academic idea of that kind of situation…

"Such a weird dream…" he said, becoming dimly aware of needles and tubes in his arms and under his nose as he blinked his eyes open, becoming aware of what he was fairly sure was a hospital room around him.

"Booth?" a voice said, followed by a beautiful brunette appearing in front him, looking at him with a smile that seemed like she was fighting the urge to cry. "Booth! You're awake!"

"So real…" he said, his mind still struggling to piece together what had been happening; he remembered a curse… he remembered a blonde warrior forced to undertake a great destiny… he remembered a brunette scientist who sought to give others the answers she'd been denied… he remembered a life dedicated to giving others somewhere to relax and have fun…

"Your operation was a success, but you reacted poorly to the anaesthesia," the beautiful woman explained, her face becoming increasingly familiar as his vision improved even if her identity remained elusive. "You've been in a coma for the past four days. What took you so long to wake up?"

"It felt so real," he said, still struggling to put things in order.

"It wasn't real," the woman said.

"Who are you?" Booth asked her, gaze focusing on her face.

He felt like he knew this woman, and he hated to see her tearful expression at that last question, but he also felt like he was missing something here… there was some context to their relationship he was having trouble pinning down right now… and there was definitely _something_ missing in the back of his mind here outside of this...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some further fics in this series are coming up soon, but feel free to let me know if you think of any other scenes in Booth/Angel’s life after this point which could be interesting reading when viewed through Angel’s eyes, or just involve his friends asking for his perspective on other events based on their new knowledge of his past.


End file.
